Setting Up Your Portfolio

Module 02Content

1. A portfolio is a grouping of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. In general, a portfolio is made up of diverse investments to ensure proper allocation between risk and return. For our project, we will be focusing on stocks and tracking their performance within an Excel workbook that we will be building and formatting.
3. For this assignment, you will build a portfolio of 10 stocks using information from the Web.
4. To start:

• Conduct research to determine which 10 stocks you will be analyzing in your portfolio and how many shares you will purchase. The amount invested can be anything over $1,000, and since this is all imaginary, the amount invested can be set very high.
• Determine which data sources you will use in your portfolio workbook.
• Think about the format your workbook will use for upcoming analysis.

2. An example of how to get started is shown below.
3. We will use Microsoft as our stock and Yahoo! Finance as the source website.
4. Go tofinance.yahoo.com.
5. In the search box at the top of the page, type in Microsoft.
6. The Microsoft page shows the following information.

• Ticker symbol is MSFT.
• Purchase price (see the Ask price).
• Current stock price (in bold; use the at close price).
• Note today's date.

2. Other possible web sources to find stocks and associated data:
3. Bankrate
4. Google Finance
5. AOL Finance
6. Marketwatch
7. Bloomberg
8. Nasdaq
10. Follow the example above, and create a worksheet that lists your ten stocks with the following criteria:
11. Your column headings should include a minimum of the following information.
12. Stock Name
13. Ticker Symbol
14. Purchase Date
15. # of Shares Purchased
16. Purchase Price
17. Total Paid
18. Add the following column headings. These columns will be used in later assignments.
19. Current Stock Price
20. Current Stock Value
21. Money Made/Lost
22. Add a title row to your worksheet and center it at the top of the table.
23. Use Times New Roman Font, bold, with 12 pt. font for column titles.
24. Use 11 pt. font for all other data.
25. Add data to the name, ticker symbol, date of purchase (today's date), number of stocks purchased, purchase price, and total price paid for each stock (use a formula when appropriate).
26. Your spreadsheet should look similar to this example portfolio below.