Before students can do some of this research, they will need to find the ticker symbols for the company stock. The Stock Market Game simulation has a built-in feature for students to look up ticker symbols for the companies they want to include in their portfolio.  Ticker symbols are typically from 1 to 5 letters, e.g., MSFT, A, PG, PZZA, etc.   The section Understanding Stock Portfolios in your Teacher Support Center includes an explanation of how to use this "ticker lookup" feature.  Note, that most newspapers use abbreviations of company names -- NOT ticker symbols.

 

News

Students can find the most recent news reports about a company as well as an archive of other recent stories through the Investor Research link in the Stock Market Game simulation.  The news stories generally come off a newswire and will be about the company or related companies in the industry. The section Understanding Stock Portfolios in your Teacher Support Center includes an explanation of how to use this "Investor Research" feature. Students can also find news articles about a company at websites like, finance.yahoo.com, Nasdaq.com, NYSE.com, etc.  To find news about a particular company, type in the ticker symbol and check "news".

Charts

Charts tell you what has happened to a stock's price over the last week, month, year, or even longer in some cases.  There are many formats for charts online, however, all charts are alike in having the price on the vertical axis and the time on the horizontal.  These charts will show daily, weekly, or monthly prices over different time frames.  Many charts will also let you select between the time frames and use added features like comparing company data to Indexes. The Stock Market Game simulation includes charts in the Investor Research feature.

Company Profiles

Many websites will provide researchers with company profiles, when students use the ticker symbol for research. This can include information like company history, products, key personnel, etc.

Annual Reports 

Many investors use Annual Reports to gather information about companies they are invested in or are researching.  Students can get information about companies from annual reports too! 

Have students write to a company for their annual report (practice letter writing skills).  You will find that many company annual reports are very creative works of art!   Students can find corporate addresses at the company website. (You can also find many websites that have annual reports, or often the corporate website will have the annual report).

Information is provided on "How to Read an Annual Report" in the Lesson Planning section of the Teacher Support Center.

Once students have researched and found a few stocks of interest for their portfolio, have them compare the performance of these stocks to the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the past 3 months, year, or 5 years.

There are also many great stock search lessons and activities in the Learning Resource Center to help the students get a good start in their stock research.

For older students, you may want to use the following:

Advice-Researching a Company (high school level) from Investor's Business Daily on the Internet.