Imagine that on March 1st you threw 20 darts at the stock listing pages of the W
ID: 3629406 • Letter: I
Question
Imagine that on March 1st you threw 20 darts at the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal, and invested $10,000 in each of the 20 stocks picked. After six months,what are your earnings? Did you do better than the Dow Jones Industrial Average? Did you do better than some of the leading stock-based mutual funds, with their professional managers who do lots of research for each purchase?Write a program to investigate this scenario, and determine your profit or loss over the period of six months.
Check this URL for a list of NYSE stock symbols, names, and other data:
www.nasdaq.com/screening/companies-by-industry.aspx?exchange = NYSE&render=download
Your program should read a table of stocks from the New York Stock Exchange, selecting 20 at random. Use Urllib and read.line. It should print a table of the 20 stocks selected, the number of shares that would have
been purchased with $10,000 on March 1, 2011, and the value of that number of shares of that stock on September 1, 2011. At the bottom of the table, show the total value that your initial investment is worth now, and the percentage of growth or loss of your total investment.
If each line starts with a 'b', then you haven't decoded the material from byte-coding to ASCII coding.
Explanation / Answer
Opinions vary, but dividing your $10,000 into 10 chunks of $1,000 each is probably sufficient. With many discount brokers charging less than $10 a trade, the commissions won't be significant. I am not sure how someone actually makes money in the market besides buying low and selling high. I am not sure how someone actually makes money in the market besides buying low and selling high.