Stock Market Project

Over the course of 3 Months my Team tracked 6 different companies by buying stock.

Step 1 Autozone(AZO)

Autozone, is an auto-parts retail store and is in the "Services" sector. As a security, we believed this was a good choice on multiple reasons: it's a large name in the auto parts business, due to the unfavorable economy people will try and do things themselves more often, and with the extreme weather of the season there will be more mechanical failure.

So far Autozone, or AZO, has been performing wonderfully. In mid October we purchased 185 shares in AZO stock at $107.25($19,841).

As of 12/11/08 stock has risen to about $126/share, which means about a $3,000 gain.

Autozone's competitors are Advanced Auto Parts, O'Reily Automotive Inc., and Pep Boys.

Comments

[Briguy9]

You spelled Hasbro wrong, three times. You wrote Hasboro

[eskimojo]

thank you for your concern but truthfully I don't care, I meant to take this down a while ago I just haven't gotten around to doing so yet, I should delete now but I'm not going to yet... +1 for procrastination today.

[eskimojo]

Just as a side-note, our class used finance.yahoo.com to do this project.

[mikeasaurus]

Mind expanding on your intro? This sounds really interesting and nerds liek me want to know stuff like: -Why are you conducting this experiment? -Why the 3 month duration? -Who's on your team? -And why only six companies? Thanks!

[eskimojo]

To tell you the truth... I just put this up here for a presentation for school. My family uses apple, and therefore are not compatible with the school-system. This was a matter of $100,000 USD(yep imaginary) given to every group. We had to invest evenly amongst 5 different companies, explain why we chose these over their competitors as well as explain the industry they are a part of. We tracked them for I believe it was 8 business weeks and then come up with a conclusion as to how well we did, what choices were good/bad and possible reasons why.

[PKM]

It sounds a bit like the ProShare competition I was in while I was studying AS level Business Studies- you get £100,000 (imaginary, sadly) to invest in 6 stocks, have a review after 6 weeks and aim to make the best profit over 3 months. I think the idea is that investing in 6 companies gives you leeway to try a few different things but stop "spread betting" where you put £1,000 on every company in the FTSE100 or something like that, and you can get in depth with your chosen companies- read investors reports, follow their share prices and news stories and so on. I'd be interested to hear if this was a similar game (and some instructions on how they chose companies, found out their recent stock history etc. would be good).

[eskimojo]

my project was almost a mirror-image of yours. I'm in intro to business and this was our final project... ugh this took me about 2.5 liters of Monster Energy drink and one all-nighter and plenty of more sleep lost... yay for procrastination.

[killerjackalope]

We did one in business studies, £1000 being the starter, I won, using smaller but not tiny stocks, one guy invested in a company that had a value of 1, next day it's 3 1/2, then it fell again and it disappeared... What I took from this was that slowly increasing but stable stocks were easiest to work with as they didn't move quickly that often, tiny stocks were dangerous because the same amount of money can change so much and that mid-level ones were still riskier but could change more. Change refers to the amount their value changed compared to their actual value...

[PKM]

My team mostly went for large stocks that had stuff going on in the news (Cadbury were releasing a new line of products or buying another company or something) which was cool but the gains only lasted a few weeks, so we saw gains of about 12% after maybe four weeks but ended up with about 6% overall because we only had one opportunity to reshuffle.

All of the teams (three) from my school did ok, the heathens at our rival school had about twenty teams that must have invested in very unstable stock- their best performer made about 700% ROI but a lot of the teams ended up losing 2/3 of their money. Lousy no-good cheating _{mumble mumble grumble}