Personal Finance 1

Do a little research on stocks.  You are going to create two portfolios to track throughout the semester.  One is your winning portfolio.  It will consist of the five stocks you think will have the greatest returns this semester.  The other is your losing portfolio and will consist of the five stocks you think will do the absolute worst this semester.

Create a third portfolio that will have only one investment, the Vanguard 500 Index mutual fund, symbol VFINX. 

Note: I would never suggest that you create a portfolio of only five stocks.  This will be for fun and educational purposes.

If you know Excel, I recommend you do these exercises in Excel.  If you do not, you may do them in Word using tables.

Create an Excel workbook with 3 sheets or create 3 Word tables.  One for the winning portfolio, one for the losing portfolio, and one for the Vanguard VFINX.  List the stocks and their prices.  For each portfolio assume you will buy $20,000 of each stock for $100,000 total investment.  Show how many shares you can buy of each stock.  Note that for the Vanguard portfolio, there will only be one investment with all $100,000 in it.

A portfolio might look something like this:

Winning Portfolio

Stock        Beginning Price    Amount Bought    Shares Bought
Apple            $100                    $20,000                    200
Microsoft        $32                    $20,000                    625
AT&T              $42                    $20,000                    476
Alphabet         $93                    $20,000                   215
Ford                $22                    $20,000                   909
________________________________________________
Total                                          $100,000

As an alternative, you can use the Portfolio App I created.  It can be downloaded from the class website under Week 1 Resources.  It is a Windows-only app.  You can use the app to easily get the latest values for each of your portfolios.  If you use the app, you can print the results using alt-PrntScrn to copy the app window and then paste it into a Word document.

Deliverable

Your  3 portfolios.