Stock Market Report The first step to building my portfolio was defining my objectives. What exactly did I want to achieve by participating in this game? Keeping in mind that many financial analysts fail to beat the S&P 500, I realized that my chances of beating the market were slim. If “professionals” have difficulty choosing the right stocks, then chances are I will to. In short, I decided that taking a gamble and investing in risky stocks to win the game was probably a futile strategy. The technical reason for why I, or any other person for that matter, cannot beat the markets is that markets are mostly efficient. Much of what I know about a company is probably public information so it is already reflected in that company’s stock price. For example, many people view Apple as a company with much potential for growth. As a result, the demand for its stock is already very great; so great that some say the demand for the company can’t go any higher. If I were to buy Apple, I must find a reason for why the public is undervaluing it; simply saying the iPhone is selling off the charts won’t work since everyone already knows that.
With this in mind, I focused on buying stocks that I was familiar with and could at least make a reasonable case as to why they were undervalued. I decided to settle on buying a group of stocks and keeping them until the end of the game. In fact, since I was investing for the long term, I pushed myself to rarely look at my holdings in order to limit the chance that I would buy or sell a stock based on its short-term price movements.
At first, I limited my search to value stocks with low Price to Earnings (PE) ratios and high Return on Equity (ROE) in relation to companies in their respective industries. I looked at companies such as Wal-Mart or Intel which were well rooted and held a clear competitive advantage. Afterwards, I searched