Stock Trading

The opportunity to be involved with this stock trading project taught us how to make transactions, understand those transactions and watch them grow (or fall). The simple rules meant that we were in control of how we conducted our buying and selling. We had the chance to buy, sell, buy long, and short sell many securities such as stocks, options, bonds, and mutual funds. The twelve- week duration of this project has come to an end and here is our analysis of the project overall.

Based on our portfolio we experienced some gains and losses. After a couple of weeks into the project we realized that our portfolio value was picking up. We approximated the increase at $7,500, which is highest jump we saw within just one week. The gain started at approximately $1,000,500 and rose to $1,008,500. We think that is due to the transactions that took place before this time frame. We invested in iShares Cohen & Steers Realty Majors because of a substantial increase in price. In addition, following the guidelines pertained to the project, we invested $10,000 in Vanguard Energy VIPERS when they were down 3.0% because we wanted to see what the outcome would be in a couple of weeks and then we covered our short position. Thereafter, we noticed a slight decreasing period for a couple of weeks. We thought we were making good progress after the last jump, however, every week following, after making a number of transactions, we saw no increase in our portfolio value.

In the week of March 21st, we first chose to buy one-hundred shares of Schick Technologies Inc. We did this because Investors Business Daily rated this stock as an "A+" out of the 10 highest rated stocks at this time. One reason it is ranked the highest is because the stock had soared 167% in the past twelve months compared to its' industry group at -33%. Also, this stock has outperformed 90% of all others in terms of recent earnings growth. Secondly, we decided to buy one-hundred shares of Wal-Mart stock due to the fact they are hiring 150,000 employees in China over the next few years. This amount is five times the current workforce in total of all Wal-Mart employees.

During the week of April 4th, we decided