Introduction
I first got interested in the stock market watching my dad do the financial accounts of a lady he knew, who owned a riding school in CheshireEngland. Some years ago, she had inherited a bunch of different shares on her fathers death, and my dad asked if I would list all the dividends she had received in that year on an excel table, that he needed to prepare her tax return. She owned shares in about 20 different companies and usually received two dividend slips every year. It was fascinating to see how much money she got from each company and to ask my dad what that company did. What was even more interesting, however, was when he showed me how he had put her “Portfolio” (that is the number of shared she owned in each company) on a private investment site in Yahoo and what their current market value was in total!
This was about two years ago, since then I have looked at this Portfolio occasionally in the internet to see if it has gone up or down and how much money this lady has won or lost as the months went by. I thought for my Project it would be a good idea to try and explain in simple terms what the stock market is, and to show that it is an alternative to simply putting ones money in a bank and getting interest. I even set up my own fictional portfolio in companies that I knew about, to see if I too could make any money, even though it was only a game.
