itle: “Quiz on Getting Started”
uthor: “Daniel Lee”
utput:
html_document:
toc: true

Read below for instruction

Suppose that you are weighing two stocks for investment: Apple and Microsoft. So you want to find out their historical performance in the past. If you had invested $1 in each stock at the beginning of 2000, which of the two stocks would have come out at the top today?

Stock prices can be found on Yahoo Finance. Follow instructions below find the data.

  1. Enter the following website address: http://finance.yahoo.com.
  2. Enter the company’s name in the “Quote Lookup” or “Enter Symbol” box.
    1. Use Chrome or Firefox. Internet Explorer doesn’t seem to work well with Yahoo Finance.
  3. Select AAPL for Apple and MSFT for Microsoft.
  4. Click on the Historical Prices link.
  5. Enter the date range January 1, 2000 to Today.
  6. Click on Apply. Don’t change Frequency.

Now that you have the data, how would you find out which of the two stocks would have been a better investment during the study period? Explain your approach in a sentence or two. In addition, list at least two challenges you might face in your approach.

Hint: There isn’t right or wrong answer here. With this short exercise, I want you to have an opportunity to see how challenging it can be to analyze performance of stocks and portfolios without R, which we will learn later in this course.

Provide your answer below

To find which stock would have been better to invest in, I would personally take the percentage of change from each company from their original value in 2000 and the value of today, and multiply that number by $1. This would then give me two numbers of what the value of my original investment would be worth today. Two challenges I may face while doing this is tracking 18 years worth of stock prices and making sure that my numbers are accurate.