Assignment

In this task you will each have £17,000 to invest in a publicly listed company of your choice. You will monitor the performance of your investment. It isonly a fictional £17,000 unfortunately but will the value of your investment increase or will you lose money?

At the end of this assessment you should be able to:-

• Better understand an organisation's published financial results;

• Construct clear charts and diagrams and interpret them;

• Use published share price data and articles from the business pages of newspapers and other credible sources to evaluate the performance of a portfolio of shares:

• Present your analysis effectively in writing.

Learning Objectives

This assessment will help you to:

• recognise the concept of the business organisation operating within the parameters of a changing external environment

• demonstrate an awareness of current issues, facts and events in the national and international business world

• identify different legal forms of company

• interpret data presented in various forms

• write an academic report with appropriate referencing

• maintain your interest and application to a long term project

• manage your time to meet academic deadlines that are some way off

The Task

You have a nominal £17,000 with which to buy shares of a company that MUST be listed on the London Stock Exchange. Try to invest in a company that you think will do well over the next six months and give you a good return on your investment, even though making a profit is not a key objective of this assessment.

You need to be able to justify your choice of company. In order to do this you should carry out some research on a range of companies using PEST analysis. You will need this information for your interim report.

Every Friday you must keep a record of the closing price of your share on the previous evening (or the closest trading day) along with the total current value of your share using an Excel spreadsheet. You should record the share prices and create chart/s to show the values graphically. Experiment with the sorts of chart that you can produce to find the best one for this task.

Every Friday you will be expected to check on the performance of your chosen share, keeping your spreadsheet updated. In Phase 3 you will also have an opportunity to sell your share and use the proceeds to invest in a different company. You have to decide whether that will give you better growth over the period of your investment.

The assessment is concerned with how you arrived at your choice of initial share, your analysis of the progress of your share/s, your judgement for keeping - or selling - the share/s and how well you justify your decisions. In order to do this, you should try to include more pieces of information than just the closing share price each Thursday. What other information might be relevant?

What are we looking for?

In order to complete this assessment you will need to use a variety of sources. These MUST be referenced in both reports. Submissions that do not indicate their sources throughout can only be awarded a maximum mark of 39%.

Interim Stock Market Report - maximum 1,300 words

To pass this assessment you MUST:

• Submit an interim report that maps the price of your chosen share up to Friday 11 May 2018 using a table and a chart

• Reference your sources

• From your mapping, select a minimum of one and a maximum of three significant price movements in your chosen share and analyse the cause(s). Provide evidence to support your analysis

To achieve a higher grade in this assessment you SHOULD:

• Provide information on why you chose to invest in this particular share

• Provide a PEST analysis for your chosen company

To achieve a grade at the highest level you COULD:

• Provide information on other companies that you considered, and why you rejected them

• Provide information on key competitors and market factors using Porter's Five Forces model

• Identify a second choice of share to use for comparisons in your final report

• Identify the sector index and one other financial index which you will use for your main report.