Stock Tips from My Students

business, lessons learned, Teaching and Education, technology 1 Minute

Over the past six days, I’ve been teaching a highly compressed version of our Intro to Business course as part of Villanova’s Summer Business Institute. We’ve covered globalization, ethics, social responsibility, entrepreneurship, leadership, planning, operations management, marketing, and today we wrapped it up with accounting and finance.

For the finance part, I thought it would be fun and informative to have the students go into their virtual breakout rooms for a few minutes and as a team, decide on the one stock they would recommend right now. When they all came back to the main room, I had each team share what their stock choice was, and I thought you might be interested to see their choices. Note that all the links below go the Investor Relations page for the companies, as opposed to their normal consumer-facing home page.

It’s a nice range of companies and industries, along with some bold bets. Despite my best efforts of trying to convince them every day how great Apple is, none of the teams chose Apple as their recommendation.

Perhaps I should create a mutual fund consisting of all these stocks and call it the SBI2020 fund. If it does well, I’ll have an all-expenses paid reunion with the students 10 years from now.

Who’s in?

Note: do not consider any part of this post to be an endorsement for these stocks. In fact, a good stock buying strategy for most people is to do the opposite of what I would do…

*image from the Motley Fool

p.s. written while listening to the Spotify playlist Deep Focus, found under the Focus genre. Quite pleasant, at multiple points while writing I was not even aware it was playing…

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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39 thoughts on “Stock Tips from My Students”

  2. That sounds like a fun exercise. If I were to invest (I do have some investments but none of these), I would put some money into Peloton. Exercising from home and competing with others (two big selling points, especially in a pandemic.)

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  3. Apple seems like a good bet, though I am not quite sure about the direction the company is going with their phone segment… Those are some interesting picks, though I am not in the stock game.

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  4. Okay, I don’t know why, but the term highly-compressed just plain sounds scary. This is an interesting experiment with an equally interesting result. I see the logic in some of the choices, buy low and sell high. And other companies who may well expect a boom in returns due to the manufacturing of pandemic related equipment. But it is an eclectic list for sure. Apple may fall into the same category as “any company the Elon Musk is involved in”. You definitely won’t be buying the stock in a price lull. But I agree both would be a continual rise in the ROI. Good to see you having some fun with your first virtual class. Your background music certainly had no impact on the entertainment value of your post. Well written, Jim!

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    1. Thanks, Brad. As you note, it is an interesting collection of companies, and I was surprised that no two groups picked the same company. And thanks for noticing the mention of the music…

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  5. quite the mix, and the only one i can see being iffy, is the cruise line. i’m not sure how long it will take before people will be willing to cruise again in big numbers. or does this have nothing to do with it? please advise.

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      1. I see what you mean, but I’m not the super-fan of “panic buying” (know it isn’t like that, but its kinda the way I see it)

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  8. Some interesting selections there. I’m not sure if Johnson & Johnson is a good bet at present, given the impending talc lawsuits, and a cruise line is a brave choice: but I guess their only way is up. I checked out the playlist – not a single piece or artist I’d ever heard of! I tried a couple, and think for me that might be more suitable as an aid to sleep rather than work!

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    1. There were some interesting choices, and I think the cruise line is the riskiest, but offers perhaps the biggest upside potential. Not my cup of tea though. And as to the music, it wasn’t bad. It certainly was not distracting, which was my biggest worry…

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      1. They are clearly hoping for a ‘buy low sell high’ win from it. It will be interesting and educative for them, and for you, to see how things develop with their choices. I’m glad the music didn’t disturb you – it was probably too bland to have an effect!

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      2. who doesn’t like the strategy “buy ow, sell high” if only it were that easy. And bland may be one to describe it, but it wasn’t too bad, nor was last night’s classical music…

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      3. Quite, but I’m sure you’re teaching them that. Classical is usually good, as long as it isn’t Bartok- mind you, I’m not sure the final part of the 1812 Overture is conducive to working 😉

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      5. I’m sure they will, if you have anything to do with it. I once attended a live performance of the full 1812 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It has great acoustics and the finale, complete with indoor fireworks and explosions, was spectacular. I wasn’t working, though…

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  12. Jim, your students’ list includes some safe bets and some bold ones. Elon Musk is on a roll with SpaceX, but the Norwegian Cruise Lines looks troublesome.I

    When I was teaching high school business, I used to have a class sort of like yours. We covered a variety of business and economic-related topics. One unit was on investments where students chose five different stocks to track over several weeks.

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  13. You have/had some good students! Looking at some of those investments in hindsight they are already good picks in this market, and it has only been a month! Tesla continues to hit new all time highs as well as Shopify. I think this is a good diverse mix and would have good returns in the long run. It’s amazing how good the stock market is at rewarding stocks with good financials.

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    1. Thanks for the comment, Isaiah! Yes, we are blessed with good students. There was a nice mix of stock choices there, and they had the luck to be choosing at a time when the market was down from its recent highs.

      I hope it got them interested in the market, and thinking long-term about their financial future…

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