Description

You will demonstrate your investment analysis strengths in the current event paper by selecting a news article from the financial or business literature concerning a publicly traded company that is of interest to you.  The article should concern any of the following topics: recent financial results and/or sales & profit outlook; new business development such as launching a new product or service; booking new orders; entering a new market; merger, acquisition or restructuring; public offering of debt or equity securities; and other such events that you deem significant from a stock price perspective.

1) The executive summary should begin with the buy, hold or sell recommendation in relation to the content of the news article you are writing about.  The rest of the paper should explain the reason for your recommendation.  A table of contents may also be included if the report has multiple sections and subheadings.

2) Calculations and support documentation should be included in the appendix, but relevant statistical support (i.e., bottom line figures such as rates of return, valuation, and so forth) should also be included in the body of the text.

3) Your goal should be to determine what the content of the news article means for the investment merits of the stock.  Does the event covered in the article have a positive, negative or neutral effect on the stock price?  Explain why.  How does this affect your investment recommendation?  For example, a company may announce increased order rates for its core business, thereby increasing its backlog of unfilled orders.  One may infer that such a development improves the sales & profit outlook, and thus make the stock a likely candidate for further price appreciation.  Conversely, a delayed shipment or lower demand would have the opposite effect.

 The text portion of the paper needs to be between 6-8 pages in length; it must be typed and double-spaced. If you are including statistical tables, graphs and charts in your paper, they can either be incorporated into the body of the text or referenced in your text and placed in an Appendix.

Please include a bibliography of the references used in your paper.  A minimum of three additional references [other than the source of the article, the required textbook or recommended workbook and case book] must be included in order to be eligible for full credit.  This implies a minimum total of 5 reference sources [or 6 if you decide to use the workbook and case book].  The bibliography should follow the APA reference style. The APA style refers to references in the text by author and year; e.g., (Jones, 1995) or (Smith, 1996; Rizzo, 1994)