Lessons Learned From Managing A Personal Stock Portfolio
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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 didnt 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 thats 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 a smart investor, this was required, but sometimes, it was just so time-consuming, that it was difficult not just to type in a few random letters in the buy box.
There were a lot more things to enjoy in this project, including learning a whole lot, the different activities to go along with the game, and the thrill when one of your stocks goes up. That experience makes you feel like the smartest person in the world, and gives you the confidence that you