2025.1 Stock Report Instructions

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2025.1 Stock Report Instructions

General Instructions:

The objective of this assignment is to bring together in a very practical way, many things you have learned in this class, previous classes, and – for most of you – work/life experience. It is fully my intent that this report will be something you would be proud to bring to a job interview, to demonstrate your financial analysis skills.

Choose any listed stock (from anywhere in the world) that is not in the EXCEPTIONS list posted on Stream, and has not been selected by another student.

Check files “Stock Exceptions List” on Stream in section “Assessment 1: Stock Report”

    and

Check forum “Post your stock selection”, for stocks chosen by other students

If you have done a stock report for me in the past (e.g. in 125340), you cannot do the same stock again.

Before finalizing your choice, check that there is a “long” history of:

· Prices (at least 10 years)

· Dividends (at least 10 years)  (you must choose a stock that pays dividends, so you can calculate DDM)

· Financial Statements

I strongly recommend a careful look at the earnings and dividends history. Missing (or even negative) earnings or missing dividends will make your analysis more difficult.

Upload details (shown below) to that forum to “claim” your choice.

(in the case of 2 students selecting the same stock, the first one who uploads complete details gets priority)

If you are in Albany or Palmerston North, you have access to Bloomberg (in the Trading Room or Investment Room), so, while not compulsory, you are expected to utilize that.  

Other data sources you should be able to get to are:

https://finance.yahoo.com

http://www.marketwatch.com

http://www.reuters.com/finance

Select 4 more “comparable” stocks, which have at least a 10 year history of prices.

By comparable, I mean other stocks which are similar in some sense.  Ideally these will be in the same industry as your target (analyzed) firm (can be in same industry of different countries), but in many cases there will not be enough, so you will need to use same sub-sector (also called industry-group) or even sector.

These will form the basis of the “Comparables” section of your stock report.

By the end of week 3, upload to Stream in the “Post your stock selection” forum:

Name, symbol, exchange, industry, price, dvds, cash flow, comparables, as detailed in the heading of that forum.

In addition to these instructions, there is a report format that you must follow.  This is in the file ‘Stock Report Template.docx’, and there are more details in the sections below.

Do NOT submit a hardcopy. I will print out the results from TurnItIn, and use that for marking.

The due date is noted in our Course Schedule, and on Stream.

Submit an electronic copy to Stream (“Stock report submission”). This electronic copy must be either in Word (.DOC or .DOCX) format, or PDF.

Submitting it to Stream will automatically submit it to TurnItIn.

Originality / Referencing

It is extremely important that you reference all material you obtain from another source using a footnote. For example, if you use text from a website include quotation marks, such as “rain is expected tomorrow” 

Referencing should use the standard APA style.

You should NOT use tables of financials for your company formatted by someone else. Rather, you should download numbers in excel and format them yourself in tables. These tables should only include data you want to show (don’t just cut/paste arbitrarily).

I will be using TurnItIn and other means to establish the originality of each stock report. Do not copy and include someone else’s phrases, even if you edit these phrases, as this will still be detected and penalized as a match.

I am not interested in what you found that someone else said about, say, Investment Risks.  I am interested in your assessment and/or summary of what someone else said. (I don’t expect you to conduct primary research, but I do expect you to use your own words to describe/discuss what others have found)

Breaches of these instructions will result in substantial penalties.

Tables:

In general, you should not include tables that you did not generate yourself. Those tables you do include (in the main body of the report) should be brief, and only used to summarize information you discuss in the main text.

Tables for DCF and comparables can be in the appendix.

Figures:

As with tables, figures in the main body of the report should be something you generate, rather than cut & paste.  Further, even more so than with tables, they should be used to illustrate points made in your text (rather than added as filler or pretty decoration).

This does not mean you generate the data yourself.

I expect that you will use published data from the above sources on the web and the company’s financial reports.  You do not need to verify that those data are correct. You will merely “repackage” the data into a more understandable and summarized format.

Note about workload:

This stock report has the potential to get out of hand, work-wise.  A professional analyst, with all their experience and information readily available, would spend full-time for about a month on one of these – roughly 200 hours.  I’m expecting from you 20-40 hours on this.  If you see you are spending much more than that, you are probably doing more than I intend.  If you see that happening, come have a chat about what you are doing before you get bogged down.

The main difference between what you will produce and a professional’s, is that you will not verify numbers and inputs.  I expect you to take data you can find as correct; then work your analysis from there.

Grading:

I form an overall view of the professionalism of the report based on its completeness and presentation, and then focus on the details provided in the various sections.