finance homework for DENNISWRIGHT

FIN 3014 — PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS FINANCE LAB

Stock Plot Assignment

Thursday October 13th or October 15th in Lab

No late assignments will be accepted. This assignment will build toward a larger assignment at the end of the semester. Turning in this assignment gives you the opportunity to receive valuable feedback for completing future assignments. Be sure to save your work.

Goals for this assignment:

· Gather historical price data

· Gather historical S&P500 data

· Use excel to manipulate gathered data

· Plot a graph

Your task:

Collect historical price data.

You have been assigned a company to research this semester. You will begin by collecting historical stock price data for the company. Historical stock prices are available on the internet through at the http://finance.yahoo.com website. At this website you will put the ticker symbol for your company in the symbol box and press “go”. At this point you will see a page that has financial information about your company. On the left-hand side of the screen there will be a series of option which you can choose to get more information about your company. At this point you want to look under “quotes” and choose “historical prices”.

At this point, you will be given some options about the time period and frequency of the data you are collecting. You want monthly data beginning January 1, 2012 and ending December 31, 2014. Once you have specified this time period, push the “get prices” button. After the historical price information appears, you will see an option “download to spreadsheet” at the bottom of the historical price table. Select this option to bring the information into an excel file.

Collect historical S&P500 data.

We would like to compare the activity of an individual company’s stock price to how stock prices are doing in the market overall. We will use the S&P500 as our benchmark for overall stock market performance. Just as we gathered historical stock prices, we can gather historical S&P500 data using the http://finance.yahoo.com website. To do this, use the same procedure as above, but instead of using your company’s ticker symbol, type “^GSPC” in the symbol box. Collect monthly S&P500 data for the January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2014 time period and save the information in an excel file.

Manipulate data.

Now that you have the information in an excel file, you can use your excel skills to manipulate it as you need. We will be using the “adjusted close” column.

Plot a graph.

You will want the date on the X axis, the price of your stock on the primary Y axis and the value of the S&P500 on the secondary Y axis. Make sure that your graph is properly labeled and is easy for the reader to understand.

Make observations.

Look at your graph and see what observations you can make. This observation will vary greatly depending upon the company you are analyzing. Some things you may want to consider are:

· Has the movement of your stock price varied greatly from that of the S&P500?

· Has the price of your stock increased (or decreased) significantly over the past five years?

· How volatile has your stock price been, especially compared to the S&P500?

Looking Forward

This will be part of your company analysis that you will complete later this semester. Be sure to keep your electronic files so that you do not have to recreate the work that you have done.

stockplotassignment