You Too Can be a Mutual Fund Manager!

Click here for the Project Write Up Form

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 the first trading session 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 the first trading session 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 Five) 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):
Please note:  The items in GREEN indicate places where you'll need formulas, the items in RED are the things you will update each week.  The update process is simple.  You copy the previous week's spreadsheet and paste it below.  Then update the red items.

Your Names	Date		The formula in this column just needs to multiply the share price by the number of shares
Dow Jones Industrial Average	7950
NASDAQ	1756
Name of the Stock (Symbol)	Shares Held	Current Share Price	Total Value of the Stock	Key News/ Updates & Other Info
Swanson Frozen Entrees (SFE)	1750	$75	$131250	We bought this stock because the CEO is a genius!!!
Swanson Household Healthcare  (SHH)	2500	$95	$237500
Swanson Entertainment Enterprises (SEE)	4500	$56	$252000	Owns the Dodgers - and they finally signed Manny
Swanson Information Exchange (SIX)	3250	$41	$133250	Rumors about hostile takeover of Klein Information Exchange
Swanson Steel Suppliers (SSS)	2400	$63	$151200	Big new contracts with Korean car manufacturers
Swanson Corporate Oversight Recon Executives (SCORE)	1500	$59	$88500
Total Value of Fund (SUM of Total Values of each stock you own)			$993700
Share Price of Fund (Total Value divided by 100000)			$9.93
Comparison to Indices ((Current DOW/# Value of Original Dow)+(Current NASDAQ/# Value of Original NASDAQ))*5			$9.81

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				10.33	10.50	11.63	11.85	12.29
Group 2	10.03	9.89		11.31	11.42	12.26	12.29	12.05
Group 3	9.21	7.84		10.26	10.09	10.29	11.07	12.88
Group 4	9.54	8.84		10.35	10.57	10.87	11.07	11.39
Group 5	10.14	10.66
Group 6	9.47	8.78		10.49	10.76	11.51	12.02	11.90
Group 7	9.57	9.54		10.89	11.23	12.02	12.09	12.19
Group 8	10.01	10.01		10.51	10.84	11.71	11.74	12.67
Group 9
Group 10	10.00	10.00		10.01	10.01	10.01	10.01	10.01
Group 11	9.35	8.67
Group 12				10.05	10.19	10.31	10.35	10.40
Group 13	8.74	9.05		8.36	8.47	8.72	8.95	8.67
Group 14				11.61	11.81	12.88	12.88	13.17
Group 15	8.78	8.47
Group 16	9.46	8.73		12.74	12.833	13.65	13.97	14.10
Group 17	9.64	9.22		10.41	10.50	9.91	9.94	10.36
Group 18	6.28	6.77		10.32	10.54	11.23	11.32	11.45
Period 5
Group 1				10.56	10.66	11.46	11.67	11.84
Group 2	9.87	9.87
Group 3	9.64	9.43		10.48	10.74	10.67	10.84	10.78
Group 4	9.26	8.53		9.83	8.49	9.14	9.35	9.59
Group 5	9.27	8.52		10.45	11.07	11.42	11.33	10.76
Group 6
Group 7	9.92	9.53		10.68	10.82	11.05	11.49	11.79
Group 8	3.93	3.38
Group 9				10.82	10.91	10.73	10.58	10.51
Group 10	9.61	9.08		10.87	11.23	11.11	11.40	11.18
Group 11	8.89	8.50		9.43	10.14	10.27	10.08	10.31
Group 12	9.77	4.33		10.16	10.35	10.63	10.90	10.83
Group 13	9.78	9.01		10.20	11.21	11.65	12.12	12.37
Group 14	9.18	8.43		9.90	9.77	9.74	9.99	9.94
Group 15				7.09	7.07	7.04	7.09	7.73
Group 16	9.40	8.83
Grup 17	9.53	8.99		10.19	11.00	11.44	12.33	12.24
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