you are now going to conduct a survey of stock prices of US companies. Attached to this assignment is an Excel spreadsheet that has a list of all the companies on the Russell 2000 Index. The Russell 2000 Index is a list of small revenue companies that are publicly traded in the US Stock Market.
you are going to take a random sample of 40 companies and research their stock prices over the last year.
Here is what I want you to do:
The Excel lists 1999 company stock symbols. You must use a random number generator to select 40 company stock symbols from the list (40 random numbers between 1 and 1999 inclusive).
For each company you are going to first find out the company associated with the stock symbol. The easiest way is to do a Google search “stock symbol ****”. Google will let you know which company has that symbol. If the company is no longer public (for example, Twitter is no longer a public company), randomly select another stock symbol to replace it.
Once you know the company name, you are going to look at the stock price of the company. You will need two values: the value of the stock as of the time you looked (today) and the value of the stock exactly one year before today.
Subtract last year’s price from the today’s price (Today’s Price – Last Year’s Price). Note that the price change can be positive or negative. If it is negative, don’t forget to keep the negative sign. This year’s price minus last year’s price.
Create a table of the Company Name, Stock Symbol, Year Ago Price, Today Price, and Price Change (remember positive or negative) for all 40 companies. If you don’t know how to put a table into a document, do some research. There are videos and documents out there to help you do this right. A poorly imbedded table will be graded poorly.
Calculate the Sample Mean and Sample Standard Deviation of the Price Change.
Calculate the 95% Confidence Interval of the Price Change.
Calculate the Sample Proportion of companies whose stock price has increased (for example, if 10 stocks increased, proportion is 10/40 or 0.250).
Calculate the 95% Confidence Interval for the proportion of stocks whose price have increased [Hint: Sometimes a calculator will show the lower bound as below 0 or the upper bound as above 1. Proportion must remain between 0 and 1, inclusive. So if that occurs, cap the affected bound by either 0 or 1. For example, if the calculator shows (-0.15, 0.23), write is as (0.00, 0.23)].
Make some personal observations about the data. Is it what you expect? Does this match what you view is happening to the stock market in general? Do you believe this trend will continue? Why or why not?
