Analysis of the Stock Market Simulation
There are many risks that people take in their lives. Yet, investing in the stock market is one of the riskiest things to do. All the money that has been saved over years, possibly saved over a lifetime, could all be lost in the blink of an eye. The Great Depression was triggered by the most well-known stock market crash in history, another crash happened in 1987, and one could happen any moment. However, people invest to make money and through this simulation strategies and a basic understanding were compiled to get a perspective on the risk and tasks involved in investing.
Although not one of the high-ranking people in the class, the outcome of the simulation was not a bad one. I lost about five-hundred and seventy dollars. Yet, I could have done much worse. If I had invested the money in a CD or a savings account, rather than in the stock market, I would never have lost any money to begin with. In a CD or a savings account, there is a fixed interest rate and so your money always increases. There is also a fixed rate of return, whatever money you put into the bank, whenever you want to take it out it is there. Yet when investing in the stock market there is not set rate of return. In the simulation, my rate of return on the stocks that I invested in was -3.43% (for six months). Even though I lost money, I did better than I thought I would have done in the simulation. Going into the project I knew nothing and I adjusted and began to understand and succeed towards the end.
While investing in the stock market at the beginning of the simulation, I would pick well-known companies, such as Wal-mart or Exxon- Mobil, to invest in. Yet, as the simulation continues and I kept dropping the rankings, I decided a change of pace was necessary. To make sure that I was investing in the right stocks, I would view the portfolio of the person in first or second in the rankings and invest in whatever investments seem to work for them. In some cases they worked for me and in some cases they turned out not to be so good. Usually, the person in first or second place was able to cheat the system and split their stocks. Since I don’t know how to do that, they would sometimes split the stock that I had invested in, so for me the stock wouldn’t do me ...
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...mpletely foreign to me when we began the simulation. Yet, after the simulation is complete and the unit is tied up I have a better understanding of the language. I might not understand how to split a stock on the simulation, but I know why it is a good thing and what would happen if I did it. I know now to buy to cover when I short sell stocks. The most important thing I took out of the simulation though was not the language. Although useful, it was learning and experiencing, a little bit, of the risk involved in investing in stock. If I had not learned about the stock market, or the risk involved, I could have invested in the future and lost all my life savings. Or I could have not done it and missed out on making a lot of money.
Although the simulation was helpful and I learned a lot from it, there were times when I did not even look at the website. There was a long time when I didn’t make any transactions and I know that went for the whole class too. In the future, maybe it might me better if you had to make a certain amount of transactions per week, because it is a project and there is learning that needs to be done. And sometimes, there wasn’t.
In conclusion of the My Virtual Life Simulation Program, I raised Luciano, my male child, until he reached the age of 18 years old. Luciano came about the world normally through a natural birth; labor lasted about 10 hours. Luciano inherited 50% of my characteristics through the survey taken prior to the start of the simulation. The other half was through the actions and changes that occurred throughout his life by the choices of my virtual partner and I and Luciano’s personal decisions later on in life. Certain characteristics Luciano developed resulted directly from the authoritative parenting style I chose to follow throughout the simulation. Despite minor setbacks towards the beginning, Luciano, developed properly in his psychological development which involved his physical, cognitive, social, and moral development, personality, emotional understanding, and peer competence. In the beginning years of his life he endured minor academic problems but later had no issue and was even involved in honor classes. He was also very social having
The United States signaled a new era after the end of World War I. It was an era of hopefulness when many people invested their money that was under the mattresses at home or in the bank into the stock market. People migrated to the prosperous cities with the hopes of finding much better life. In the 1920s, the stock market reputation did not appear to be a risky investment, until 1929.First noticeable in 1925, the stock market prices began to rise as more people invested their money. During 1925 and 1926, the stock prices vacillated but in 1927, it had an upward trend. The stock market boom had started by 1928. The stock market was no longer a long-term investment because the boom changed the investor’s way of thinking (“The Stock Market Crash of 1929”). The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was a mass hysteria because of people investing without any prior knowledge and the after effects that eventually led to the Great Depression.
In October 1929, the United States stock market crashed due to panic selling. This crash started a rippling effect that contributed to a world wide economic crisis called the Great Depression. This crash was such a shock because of the economic expansion of the 1920’s when the Dow Jones average reached an all time high of three hundred eighty one. The year 1928 was a time of optimism and the stock market had become a place where everyday people truly believed that they could become rich. People everywhere were talking about the market and newspapers were reporting stories of ordinary people such as chauffeurs, maids, and teachers making millions off the stock market. People who didn’t have the money bought on margin. The stock market was booming and the excitement about the market caused a lot of over speculation. People ignored the small signs of the impending crash until Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. Four days later the stock market fell again.
Comparing the 1929 Market Crash and the Current Position in the Stock Market During the 1920's, the North American economy was roaring, but this decade would eventually be put to a stop. In October of 1929, the stock market began its steepest decline to this date in history. Many stock market traders and economists believe and pray that it was a one-shot episode never to be repeated. On the other hand, many financial analysts and other economists believe that the current stock markets are in place to repeat the calamitous errors of the 1920's. In this paper, I will analyze the causes of the crash and discuss the possibilities of it re-occurring.
Supply and demand plays an intricate role in the amount, price, and availability of products and services. The applying supply and demand concepts simulation guides users through making decisions for Goodlife, a management company for 2 bedroom apartments in Atlantis. The simulation names the user the property manager; responsible for vacation residents, new pricing for units, and advertising. The property manager makes decisions in circumstances including the changing of supply cure, demand curve, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and the equilibrium of price and quantity. All of these decisions move the business along as conditions change around it.
This assignment is concerned with your understanding of the key issues relative to portfolio analysis and investment. In completing this assignment you are to limit your scope to the US stock markets only. Use the Cybrary, the Internet, and course resources to write a 2-page essay which you will use with new clients of your financial planning business which addresses the following issues and/or practices:
To maximize optimum performance of our investment portfolio, we placed a certain percentage of equity in different sectors of the stock market.
I am one of those guys that like to make the world a better place so I feel like if I used what I learned from business simulation I can help make the world a better place for sure. A major key to success for me is making sure the world is a better place so I feel like if I can open more businesses in the future I am changing the world because that will give people who don’t have a job something to do. The biggest thing that I learned from doing the module was managing your products for me that is a big key if you want to have a business because you have to make sure your business is heading the right direction. Like I said before what I can do with what I learned from this class is just to open up my own business because I feel like I can do that. I just need to be that one businessman that can change people life in so many ways by giving them jobs or just making sure they are taking care of. With what I learned in business simulation I can put it to use by opening up my own business even it is not a big business I want to open up something that I will put money in my pocket and also a business that will help me send to my family that living in Africa. They are depending on me so much so I feel like if I don’t have a business to support them let them down. That one of reason why I am taking business so I can just let my mother
In order to make the most logical and beneficial purchases, it was first important that I fully understood the terminology used within the stock market. Words such as blue chip stock, mutual fund, stock splits, and ticker symbol would all prove incredibly important for me to understand if I was to do well within the game. For example, the first stock I bought, Disney, taught me the definition of a ticker symbol - in Disney’s case, DIS. This enabled me to quickly identify other stocks by their ticker symbols as well, and I soon became familiar with the term. In addition, when I bought Coca-Cola, I soon learned its financial importance as a reliable blue-chip stock, as it and other stocks like it proved profitable for me. My class was also required to buy a mutual fund, and in doing so I learned how exactly a mutual fund differs from a stock, the positives and negatives of buying one, et cetera. In addition, my knowledge of the history that places like the NYSE contains proved incredibly important towards my success within the game. Because I learned about the NYSE’s foundation and the many people who worked to make it what it is today, I was able to fully appreciate the importance of the stock market as I moved through the simulation. This, in turn, helped me take the Stock Market Game seriously and not waste any of my money on stocks that I considered
There is a sense of complexity today that has led many to believe the individual investor has little chance of competing with professional brokers and investment firms. However, Malkiel states this is a major misconception as he explains in his book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. What does a random walk mean? The random walk means in terms of the stock market that, “short term changes in stock prices cannot be predicted”. So how does a rational investor determine which stocks to purchase to maximize returns? Chapter 1 begins by defining and determining the difference in investing and speculating. Investing defined by Malkiel is the method of “purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably predictable income or appreciation over the long term”. Speculating in a sense is predicting, but without sufficient data to support any kind of conclusion. What is investing? Investing in its simplest form is the expectation to receive greater value in the future than you have today by saving income rather than spending. For example a savings account will earn a particular interest rate as will a corporate bond. Investment returns therefore depend on the allocation of funds and future events. Traditionally there have been two approaches used by the investment community to determine asset valuation: “the firm-foundation theory” and the “castle in the air theory”. The firm foundation theory argues that each investment instrument has something called intrinsic value, which can be determined analyzing securities present conditions and future growth. The basis of this theory is to buy securities when they are temporarily undervalued and sell them when they are temporarily overvalued in comparison to there intrinsic value One of the main variables used in this theory is dividend income. A stocks intrinsic value is said to be “equal to the present value of all its future dividends”. This is done using a method called discounting. Another variable to consider is the growth rate of the dividends. The greater the growth rate the more valuable the stock. However it is difficult to determine how long growth rates will last. Other factors are risk and interest rates, which will be discussed later. Warren Buffet, the great investor of our time, used this technique in making his fortune.
While it is very important for young individuals to start to save and invest for their retirement, there are aspects that they should consider before jumping into investing into securities. Those subjects are cash, enough insurance, should you buy a home, how secure is your job, how much risk can you handle, equities are risky, get started, do everything, be flexible, and can you save and invest too much. These ten aspects should be looked at, analyzed, and taken into very critical thought before saving and investing into securities.
I became an enthusiast of finance ever since I was at high school. At the political economy class, my teacher asked us: if you have a million RMB, how would you use it? She then introduced us the concept of investment, and I was intrigued specifically by the stock. For the latter two years of my high school, I have been reading books and articles regarding the stock market in the U.S. and in China. As one of the outstanding students ranked top 1% in College Entrance Exam in Hainan Province, China, I was accepted by the City University of Hong Kong with a full scholarship. With the strong interest in finance, I chose quantitative finance and risk management as my major.
Have you ever invested in the stock market? If so, do you know where your money is really going? The stock market is a risky business and it can make or break people’s lives. The stock market is used daily to keep America on its trembling feet; it’s also being used at this very moment to cheat people out of money for personal gain. This happens every day in the stock market and its evolving rapidly, super computers that can trade faster than a blink of an eye, social media trends that can predict share values, and intricate stock market schemes that are getting harder and harder to find and take down.
Did the simulations help you to better understand a disability in that area? If so, how?
Never have I ever climbed a mountain peak. As a child, I imagined myself conducting expeditions in deep-frozen pathways, leading amateur explorers to the top of the world, and instructing rookies in surviving harsh blizzards. Even though slightly altered, my childhood dream has been achieved. I led a team of fellow classmates, in my Strategic Management course, to the success summit of a financial competition. Over the course of a semester, I and my teammates were supposed to create and manage a company of the IT industry, in a computer-simulated environment, along with other four rival teams. I dealt with strategy and financial matters of our virtual enterprise, while my colleagues were working on marketing and manufacturing. During the four months of the exercise, I have experienced finance from various aspects: capital budgeting, through selecting favorable investment for upcoming quarters; debt management, by assessing the necessary amount and efficiency of loans; profitability analysis and dividend policy, which had been used to compile the company’s general performance index. Working in a multinational team, which included an American, a Norwegian and a Moldovan, strengthen my negotiations skills, as well as flexibility and cooperation. But above all, this experience intensified my passion for finance. Of course, a pleasant bonus was the fact that, in the end, our company’s financial performance was six times the performance of second-best team.