How to Make a Stock Portfolio List to Check Daily
When you start investing, it helps to create a "paper portfolio" before you put your hard earned money at risk. Creating a list of stocks you plan to buy and tracking the prices of those stocks on a daily basis give you an idea how volatile the stock market can be. This exercise also tests your stock-picking ability. If the stocks you choose tend to do poorly, you may want to avoid individual stocks and choose a diversified stock mutual fund instead.
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Instructions
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Read financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal or Investors Business Daily. You can subscribe to these publications or read them at a library. Go through the stock tables and pick out stocks you want to track. You can choose stocks based on any criteria, including companies whose products you admire, firms in the news or the company for which you work.
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Open a spreadsheet program on your computer. Create a spreadsheet and give it a name, such as "Stock Price Tracker." Place each stock you have chosen on a separate line of the spreadsheet.
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Create labels for the columns across the top, and label them with dates, starting with the first day you record stock prices. Create a label for each day for as long as you want to track the stocks.
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Enter the daily price of each stock in your spreadsheet. You can check the price of the stocks in the financial media or on websites such as Yahoo! Finance and CNN Money.
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Navigate to the Yahoo! Finance website at quote.yahoo.com. Enter the ticker symbol of each stock you want to check. Once you have entered the stock symbol, the Yahoo! site will remember it and create a portfolio for you. This portfolio will be available on the right-hand side of the screen.
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Review the price information shown on your spreadsheet. Use that information to determine which stocks have been the most volatile.
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References
- Photo Credit stock market analysis screenshot image by .shock from Fotolia.com
