Investment Journals

As discussed last class, you will be required to provide evidence of your stock market activities each day.  To make this easy and environmentally friendly, we will use our Google Docs account to create an Investment Journal.


I wanted to provide you with examples of quality journal entries that meet the required expecations.  Enjoy.


January 5, 2011


Today i was looking at Petsmart and its peers. Their price to earnings ratio is not the highest out of the sector but not the lowest either. Petsmart beat expectations each time except for the last quarter. Im going to wait a little bit to see if maybe they will have a pullback (a 5% price reduction) because the company is up right now and I want to buy the stock when it is lower. One of the reasons i am wating for a pullback because they were talking about it happening in the news.


Another fantastic journal entry is as follows:


December 20

• I bought into American express at 41.73 per share
• The p/e ratio of axp is 13, better than its industry average of 15, the estimated target is around 50 dollars per share, the volume today is at 24 million far superior to the 10 day average of 9.4 million so it is obvious that people have been selling it to collect their profits. I was able to buy it around the daily low and it has climbed since then,
• The company is one of the industry leaders
• The beta is 1.94 (making it slightly more volatile than the market)
• The price has been going down the past 4.5 days
• kbw has set the target price now at 60$
• I have now found that some of the reason why the price has been going down is because the American Express card is being effected by new fed rules for debit card interchange rates.  I need to be careful because of the higher fees and new rules may negatively impact the stock's performance. 
• axp has potential to drop under $40 per share.  I am going to watch the volume closely to see what the concensus opinion is regarding the stock.