Stock Market Project

Intro: 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.

STEP 2: Hasboro(HAS)

Hasboro is one of the largest names in Toys&Games, under the Consumer Goods sector.. With an outstanding safety record, generosity in charitable organizations, Hasbro looked like a great candidate to buy stock in. With the holiday season approaching we expected the value of Hasbro stock to rise.

However that was not the case, stock had fairly uneventful ups and downs, ending more recently on the 8th with a loss of $1.37/share

Hasbro's competitor, Mattel, had just about the same ups and downs.

We bought a total of 666 shares at $29.98 per share, the total $19,966.68.

STEP 3: AT&T(T)

AT&T is a Domestic Telecom Service Provider, in the Technology sector. AT&T offers low priced service and easy payment plans. This company also has a large range of attractive cell-phones that are exclusive to them. We invested in AT&T because we believe with strict security and large cost of travel many people will be communicating through such services more often during the holidays. AT&T is also the only provider that offers the iPhone, which has gained a large amount of popularity ever since its release.

We bought 765 shares of AT&T at $26.07/share, spending a total of 19,941.55. AT&T didn't disappoint. The stock rose almost every week. We decided to sell our AT&T stock in early December in order to equalize our portfolio. We sold our shares and gained almost 2,000 extra.

AT&T's main competitor is Verizon. Both are strong companies and have a similar trend on a week to week basis, as shown in the graph below. Verizon is strong because they are more diversified in the Telecom business offering fast internet and high quality TV through Fiber Optic systems.

STEP 4: Diageo(DEO)

Diageo is a name that most people don't recognize. However Diageo's products are known the world over. A britished based beverage company Diageo has a wide range of products including Guiness(Beer), Smithwicks(Beer), Jose Cuervo(Tequila), Smirnoff(Vodka), and Johnny Walker(Scotch). Due to the increased alcohol intake during the end of the year, with a high concentration of holidays, we decided that a "sin stock" such as this would hold high value come December.

We aquired a total of 317 shares at $63.09/share spending a grand total of $19,999.53.

As it turned out DEO went into a steady decline, dropping from the $63.09/share to the current $56.03/share. Which just perfectly demonstrates that not everything is guaranteed, especially not on the stock market.

STEP 5: Toyota Motor Corporation(TM)

Toyota Motor corp. is in the Consumer Products sector under Automotive Manufacturing. A strong brand that gained a strong grip in America with the release of the Prius Hybrid vehicle, a vehicle that sips on gas and helps the environment by reducing carbon emissions. Based on that alone we decided that Toyota would be a good brand to buy.

We bought 287 shares at $69.52/share spending a total of $19,952.24

With unstable oil-prices and the bail-outs automotive manufacture stocks have plummeted. Todays worth of our stocks have slipped to just under $18,000. The stocks are now at $62.58 a $7 difference per share.

STEP 6: Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated(COKE)

After selling our shares in AT&T we bought up Coca-Cola Co. Consolidated. This is the distribution and bottling branch of Coca Cola Company(KO) We decided to try out Coke noting a trend in it's rise and fall in stocks. At the time when we were on the search for new stocks to buy, Coke was low in price.

we bought 475 shares at $42/share, spending $19,960.

In the short time that we've held the shares Coke has stayed at about the same price/share, currently $42.17. Coca-Cola's main competitor is Pepsi. Pepsi being another soda distributor has pretty much stayed in the same price range as Coke. The Pepsi stock used in the graph is simlar to COKE being Pepsico's bottling subsidiary. Both companies offer similar beverage products(i.e. Diet, Zero Calorie, similar flavors, and Juice brands).

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.

[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!

[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).

[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

[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.

[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.

[eskimojo]

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