PROJECT: 5 Stocks on Your Birthday

Let’s pretend you have a wealthy grandma who, on your 10th birthday, offered to buy you 100 shares of the stock of your choosing. In this project, you’ll track how you would have done on this investment, depending on which company’s shares you purchased.

Part I: Pick 5 Companies

Now, Grandma would only buy you one company’s stock, but go ahead and pick 5 publicly owned companies that you could have chosen at the time. They must have existed on your 10th birthday and should still exist now — no sense choosing a bankrupt company.

Part II:  Track the Prices

Follow these steps to track the prices of the 5 companies’ shares yearly on your birthday. Here is a How To Video if you need help.

1. Open this project’s Stock Tracker, spreadsheet.
2. Open Yahoo! Finance in another tab or window.

Part III:  Compare the Stocks

Click to the last tab in your spreadsheet, titled “Stock Comparison.” Follow the directions in this How To video to learn how to create a single graph with all 5 stocks’ data. You can use the graphs to help you decide which stock choice would be best.

NOTE: We’ve edited the Stock Comparison tab of the spreadsheet so that your values from the 1-5 tabs will automatically carry over, so you can skip that step from the video, now.