IS 356

IT for Financial Services

Checklist for Final Stock Market Project Report

This class project is less about the size of your gain or loss and more about how IT shapes the investment process and the sources of information and IT that you used to compile and manage your portfolio. The following checklist will help you to prepare your report: it is only a guide. The checklist is comprehensive but incomplete so you may add other things that you feel are appropriate.

  1. How did you select your companies for the first part of the assignment? Specify what ADR stocks you selected and what stocks you shorted. You may either talk about individual stocks or you can group different stocks together and talk about them at the same time rather than talk about each one. This may be especially useful if your group has a large number of trades.
  1. Did you use stock screeners (one or more)?
  1. What conventional and unconventional sources of information did you use? You can refer to your sources in the body of the text or you can use footnotes or endnotes.
  1. How did you approach the virtue vs. vice exercise? What do you conclude from this exercise? What does the research say about socially responsible investing or mutual funds that follow this theme?
  1. When did you watch Cramer? Which of his recommendations did you respond to? What does the academic research say about a Cramer effect? Did you notice any Cramer effect in your stocks?
  1. Where did you go to find information on IPO companies?
  1. How did you perform during the day trading part of the game?
  1. Add a references section if necessary.
  1. Move tables and graphs to an appendix so that you have more space to talk about what you did. I expect to see tables that compare performance on virtue and vice stocks; perhaps something for the Cramer effect, and any others you think might help. Add graphs for stock price movements over time.
  1. Add page numbers to the report.
  1. You wrote a one-page investment strategy at the start of the game. If you were to rewrite that strategy today, what changes might you make to it and why? Did you find that your group diverged from this strategy in order to take advantage of opportunities that might have been prohibited by the original strategy if you were held to it?
  1. At the end of the report, add a section that describes what you learned from the game and what changes you might make to the game going forward. What you learned from the game is especially important as it shows me what you learned from playing the game and how you might approach stock investing in future in either a professional or private investor capacity. Was there anything that you particularly liked or disliked? How do you think you might manage information overload?

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