MARKET RECAP WEEK 1-2 

Investing in the stock market has been a very new and fun experience for me, and during the past two weeks I have learned a drastic amount about the stock market. When the stock market challenge was first introduced to me I was very intimidated as I knew nothing about the market. The first stock I bought was Disney (DIS). I made this decision because I thought that it was a safe stock to buy. Disney is a major company that has been doing well in their theme park revenue, they have a new line of movies coming out, and had recently acquired a parts of a new company named BAMTech which would help with the amount of subscribers they are losing with ESPN. BAMTech is an online streaming service, and Disney believed that by offering the services to stream sports online ESPN would do better. The price for Disney was already at a low, which was $95.95 a share, so I bought 530 shares of it. I thought of Disney as a long-term investment. I knew that Disney was not going to be a stock that would shoot up overnight and I wanted to put money into a stock that would be steady, and make me money in the long term. A few days passed and I found out I was wrong. The stock for Disney crashed 1-2% because of the news released about the crocodile incident in their Florida theme park. Till this day the stock did not recover, but I did not sell the shares as I have faith in Disney to improve the company and make the price of the stock go up. 

At this point everyone else in the class was making money and I knew that I had to start making some moves so that I don't fall too behind in the challenge. I started to read different articles online about how to invest, and make money in a safe way. From reading these articles I learned that it is important to have a diverse portfolio to balance my gains and losses, that a lot of companies releases their earnings every quarter and by reading articles about this we can anticipate if the stock is going up or down, that sometimes it's better to let go of a stock with a loss rather than holding on to it for longer which can result in a greater loss and that it is very important to do your research before going into a stock. 

I decided to follow the strategies I learned and invested majority of my money in big companies such as Pfizer, Fedex, and FitBit. The remainder of my money I put into more risky stocks such as Mylan, United States Oil Fund and Alcobra. I was doing well in 11th place, but over the weekend I dropped all the way to 25th as everyone else started to make a ton of money. Again, I did not want to fall behind and started to read about how I can earn money quickly. By doing research I learned that investing in the biotech industry can make you a lot of money, but is very risky. I made the decision to get into this industry because I knew that if I ever wanted to catch up to everyone else I needed to be risky. I put about 30% of my buying power into a new drug that is in development by Aralez Pharmaceuticals. I chose this company because the development of the drug has been doing very well, and after looking at the FDA calendar I learned that the date in which they were announcing if the drug would get approved was coming up soon. This stock eventually increased about 20% and I bought out and I didn't want to get too greedy. On the side I was also making small profits off smaller companies and it helped me climb up to 8th place. 

Overall, being in the stock market challenge the past two weeks has been an incredible learning experience for me. I was able to learn by myself hands on about investing and the risks that come with it. Although it's not real money, the thrill of gaining money in the game was astonishing and losing money was a terrible feeling in my gut. I look forward to seeing the development of my knowledge in the stock market, and how far I'm able to go.