Assignment 4: Stock Prices

For each question, if it asks for information about a company, write about each company your team is covering and make the report correspondingly longer. If it asks about something else, then just answer the question, and do not write a longer answer just because you have a bigger team, unless the question specifically says to.

1. (Web marketing) Find something being sold on the web. Enclose a copy of the first page, and a copy of the order form. Do you think this particular web page will be successful? Find one product for each member of your team.

2. (The Four P's) For each company in your group, write a few sentences on something that has been happening with each of the Four P's-- a new product, price movements, a coupon campaign, international sales force expansion, etc.

3. (Stock Price Data) Imagine that each member of your team has 100,000 dollars. Each of you pick an asset portfolio consisting of at least 20,000 dollars in each of the following three categories:
   A. Your company's stock
   B. A stock from the NASDAQ exchange
   C. A U.S. Treasury bond.

   A team should not duplicate securities-- if you have a three-person team, you should have a total of 9 securities in three portfolios. You can suppose that you can buy and sell fractional securities and that there are no commissions. You can ignore dividends and interest payments.

   You can use www.Stockmaster.com for this, or any other device you find useful.
   Email the T.A. your list of assets within a few days, so we know you've gotten started.

   Make a table and a graph showing how each person's three-part portfolio is doing and how the Dow Jones Industrial Average is doing for a one-calendar-week period during the time before this assignment is due (that is, Monday to Monday or Thursday to Thursday, etc.) For each day, show the value of the total three-stock portfolio. You don't need to show the individual stocks' performance, just the portfolio performance.

   Each team will submit a portfolio for each person in the team. You will not be graded on how well you do in picking stocks. If you turn out to be a stock psychic, your reward will be the millions of dollars you can earn in the future with your investment newsletter, but this assignment is just for fun and to teach recordkeeping.

   Finally, make a table showing by what percentage (a) each of the portfolios in your team, (b) their average, (c) the Dow Jones, (d) the single best stock, and (e) the single worst stock that your team has been following increased over the time period of the assignment.

4. Pick a day and find in the Wall Street Journal the exchange rate between the U.S dollar and the Canadian dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the German mark. For each of them, given the dollar price of one unit of the foreign currency.

5. Find in the Wall Street Journal the price of a share of Sumitomo Bank and of Volkswagen. Report the results in both the local currency and in dollars per share.