Lessons Learned from Managing a Personal Stock Portfolio
Lessons Learned from Managing a Personal Stock Portfolio
This report is going to talk about every aspect of the stock market game that I recently finished participating in with this Intro to Business class. It will state the good and bad times I experienced doing this project, my most and least successful trades, the challenging and easy activities that went along with this project, improvements, and most importantly, what I learned from taking part in this game.
First of all, I would like to talk about the good trades, the bad trades, and the trades that were just a waste of making.
The greater part of my stock portfolio was made up of technology stocks, which actually, I regret now. The majority of these stocks went way down towards the end of the game, including Microsoft Corp., AOL Time Warner, and Yahoo Inc. This surprised me, because I believed that these stocks would do the best.
Another group of stocks that didn’t do really well for me are the goods-selling companies, including Costco Wholesale, Home Depot Inc. Safeway Inc., and Wal-Mart Stores.
On the other hand, my consumer-good type stocks did the best overall. They provided me with a reasonably good profit. One example is Coca Cola Co. which gave me a 21% rate of return. I think that’s pretty darn good!
The one stock that I am definitely glad I invested in is Sony Corp. I invested in this stock mainly because it had a steady stock chart, and I figured it would give me a fairly reasonable profit, but boy was I surprised when I found that at the end of the game, I had an 18% profit. This was actually just a lucky trade I made, and the fact that I didn’t sell it when it went down a little bit helped quite a bit Pixar is another example of a lucky trade, which provided me with a 24% rate of return!
There were a few stocks that were just a waste of investing in, because they didn’t provide me with neither a high gain, nor loss. An example of this would be Quicksilver, which I held on to for approximately eight days, and in all that time, gave me a five cent profit!
The most challenging part of this project was probably all the research that had to be done. I knew that to be...