Initial Research

The stock market is something companies invest in when they want to grow their companies. So first of all stocks and shares are very similar. The stock of a company is sold in units called shares. Shares are a way of measuring the units of ownership in a company. When you have a stock it means you have multiple shares, because "stock" generally refers to a portfolio of shares. When you buy a share you become one of the owners of the company, a shareholder. A dividend is a distribution of a portion of the company’s earnings that the board of directors decides. Dividends can be distributed as cash payments, as shares of stock, or other property. The dividend is usually distributed annually. A few of the major world markets are the New York stock exchange, London stock exchange and Tokyo stock exchange.

To understand what a ticker symbol is you first need to understand what a security is. A security is something you can trade that represents an ownership position in a stock. A ticker symbol is an arrangement of characters, like numbers or letters, representing a particular security. When a company issues securities to a market so that they can be traded, the market has to associate an available ticker symbol to the securities. Each security has it’s own unique ticker symbol like a thumbprint so that it’s easier for the markets to place orders and to trade everyday. Some markets have longer, shorter, more simple or more complex ticker symbols but they are all the same thing.

A mutual fund is an account controlled by a professional so that people who don’t know that much about finance can still invest in stocks and shares. In a mutual fund people deposit money and the professional then does all the investing, this could either benefit you or make you lose money depending on the amount of money you deposit and the shares and stocks the professional invests in.

The demand is the need for the product or stock. If the demand is high the company makes more products and/or sells more shares. Companies can also increase the price of the ones it already has so that they have more value, and vice-versa, so if the supply is abundant the prices go down, this is when it gets risky and you lose money. Now the supply is how much is actually available at the time, so they kind of go hand in hand.

Pros and Cons of investing in a stock market depend on your point of view, but these are the ones I think are the most important. Pros; you earn income from the dividends, long term growth potential in companies resulting in more money. Cons; risk of banking crisis, there is always a risk when it comes to investing. The most important con to me is the the Eurozone is constantly changing and it’s scaring away investors.

October Reflection

So far most of my companies are doing well. My 2 best companies are Netflix and iRobot. I've been going up in the ranks lately. At the beginning of this project I was at the very end , I was 30-35th, and now I'm always in the top 5. This shows that the investments I made were the right ones. One of the reasons why I think iRobot is having a lot of profit is because robots are being used more often. Therefore, more people buy them and the company grows, thus making the shares more valuable.

Final Reflection

Throughout the entire project many companies did well but faltered from time to time. The companies Netflix and iRobot did extremely well throughout and were never in the negatives. Right now at the end of my project Netflix has a 20.18% increase and iRobot is at 31.42. The companies that are doing the worst are by far GSK, Nestle, and Tesla. They weren’t all always doing so bad though. At the beginning Tesla and Nestle were some of my best companies and then they plummeted around half way, GSK was always one of my worst. They are all at around -11%. Netflix is a big company that grows everyday so it’s good performance was expected, while iRobot isn’t that well known, it unexpectedly did extremely well. These companies had very good performances because more and more people bought shares so the price went up so each share was worth more. I had one company that was doing really really bad so I traded 15 stocks. I was left with 5 stocks of the company and in the end those 5 stocks did well. If I could change something now, it would probably be to get rid of GSK because i kept waiting to see if it would get better but it never did and it made me lose a lot of money. I would also buy some more shares from target because they have started getting better recently.