You Too Can be a Mutual Fund Manager!

This project will give you and your partner the opportunity to manage a stock mutual fund of your own creation for the next ten weeks.  This fund will be comprised of a mixture of stock holdings selected by you and your partner. Your goal is to increase the value of your fund as much as possible over the length of the project.

Here are some of the basic guidelines for the project:

• Each pair will start with $1 million - the value of your fund is measured by your share price.  Each fund has 100,000 shares, so your share price is the total value of the stocks divided by 100,000.
• All stocks held must be traded on either the NYSE or the NASDAQ
• Each pair will come up with a legitimate professional name for their fund.
• Transactions (buying or selling the stock that is in your fund) can be carried out on Mondays and Thursdays - each transaction made after 3/10/05 must be documented by a transaction slip signed by myself or one of the TA's.  You will be turning in all of your transaction slips with your final project.
• Each transaction carried out after 3/10/05 will carry a $500 fee charged against the assets in your fund.
• You will be responsible for charting the weekly value of your fund on an Excel spreadsheet you will be creating and maintaining in class.  This spreadsheet will contain the number of shares of each stock that you hold, as well as weekly price updates. 
• Overall fund holdings will be posted weekly (Period One, Period Two, Period Three) on this website so that you can track the performance of your fund against the others.
• Your goal is to beat the indexes, you want your fund to outperform the NASDAQ and the NYSE (as well as the funds of all your classmates, of course).  Each time you update your sheet it is important that you record the overall value of the Dow (NYSE) and the NASDAQ.  These numbers are used to measure the overall performance of your stocks and your fund as a whole.
• You will be turning in your spreadsheet, your transaction slips, and a write up for the project that analyzes the performance of your stocks as well as the key things you learned from this project.

Your spreadsheet should be set up roughly like this (we'll go over how to set this up):

Your Names	Date
Name of the Stock (Symbol)	Shares Held	Current Share Price	Total Value of the Stock	Key News/ Updates & Other Info
Swanson Frozen Entrees (SFE)	1250	$75	$93750	We bought this stock because the CEO is a genius!!!
Swanson Household Healthcare  (SHH)	1500	$95	$142500
Total Value of Fund			$236250
Share Price of Fund			$2.36
Cash Reserves			$763750
NYSE (update this weekly)	11056.25
NASDAQ(update this weekly)	2215.10

You will be creating a new section of your spreadsheet for each of the ten weeks of the project so that we can track your progress.

Share Price Standings by class period:

Fund Name	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10	Week 11	Week 12
Group 1
Group 2	10.03	9.89
Group 3	9.21	7.84
Group 4	9.54	8.84
Group 5	10.14	10.66
Group 6	9.47	8.78
Group 7	9.57	9.54
Group 8	10.01	10.01
Group 9
Group 10
Group 11	9.35	8.67
Group 12
Group 13	8.74	9.05
Group 14
Group 15	8.78	8.47
Group 16	9.46	8.73
Group 17	9.64	9.22
Group 18	6.28	6.77
Period 5
Group 1
Group 2	9.87	9.87
Group 3	9.64	9.43
Group 4	9.26	8.53
Group 5	9.27	8.52
Group 6
Group 7	9.92	9.53
Group 8	3.93	3.38
Group 9
Group 10	9.61	9.08
Group 11	8.89	8.50
Group 12	9.77	4.33
Group 13	9.78	9.01
Group 14	9.18	8.43
Group 15
Group 16	9.40	8.83
Grup 17	9.53	8.99
Period 5

A few suggestions for research:
CNNfn , Bloomberg, Google Business News (you can put a symbol into google and get a quote), the NASDAQ , or the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)

Back to the APS/Economics Page