my company name is Dow chemical CO

FIN 3014 — PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS FINANCE LAB

Stock Plot Assignment

Due Date: If your lab meets on Mon/Wed June 18

If your lab meets on Tue/Thu June 17

No late assignments will be accepted for credit. Be sure to save your work. We will be using this project as part of our final project at the end of the semester. Completing this assignment gives you the opportunity to receive valuable feedback for completing future assignments.

Goals for this assignment:

• Gather historical price data

• Gather historical S&P500 data

• Use Excel to manipulate gathered data

• Plot a graph

• Interpret and present results

• Construct a professional memo

Your task:

Collect historical price data.

You have been assigned a company to research this semester (See ‘Company Assignments’ on Blackboard Learn). You will begin by collecting historical stock price data for the company. Historical stock prices are available on the internet through at thehttp://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 June 1, 2009 and ending May 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 thehttp://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 same period (June 1, 2009 through May 31, 2014) 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 for each security and the corresponding date. The rest of the columns of data can be deleted.

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. Axis minimums should be set to zero and axis maximums should be adjusted such that both series of data fit on the graph, fill out the majority of the graph, and start at the same point. 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?

• Does it follow the same trend? Does your firm over/underperform the S&P?

• 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?

Formatting.

Results should be presented in memo format. Observations should be written in complete sentences in paragraph form. The assignment will be turned in as a hard copy in your Lab on the assigned due date. Be sure to proofread your work. Your paper should be free of typos and grammatical errors and presented professionally. Your future boss will expect professional quality work and will not waste time trying to decipher your writing.

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.

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