Case Study

OTIS Portfolio Management Project

My initial feelings about the market were bearish upon starting this class, but most of those feelings were based off of small tidbits of information I have heard here and there as well as my general feeling of malaise with our economy. Throughout this project and the class time I came to realize the market was more bull than bear, even if the regular working stiffs like me didn’t feel it yet.

Closer inspection of the markets definitely lends to the realization that the U.S. economy is in a state of expansion, although I feel like it is one that I have never witnessed before as it really still feels like we are in a recession to most of the public. I think this is mostly because of the mistrust the public is now conditioned to have after the markets did their best impersonation of a game of craps at the end of the past decade. All that said I do feel like the U.S. economy is continuing to strengthen over the next couple months and going forward. With the Dow close to all time record highs, it is hard to be pessimistic when looking at the data.

When deciding which equity stocks to invest in during this project I have to admit I was naïve to most of it. I found myself pretty much buying stocks that interested me without doing hardly any research. The funny thing is that those initial buys wound up being the best things I did over the course of the project. Stocks like Sony and Disney were where I was able to cash out with my highest gains. I quickly learned how timing is king in the market and I only wish I would have held out even longer on those two stocks before selling. My portfolio in the beginning had about 6 different holdings and I was doing well in comparison with the rest of the class. It was at this time that the tide began to turn against me as I was very much so focused on the real-time rankings listed within OTIS. My strategy went from somewhat passive to all out aggressive and I wound up jumping on Apple when at...