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  • The Stock Market Project

    Weather is not the only chaotic system with which we interact.

    Pick ten stocks listed on your local stock exchange, the one reported in your daily newspaper, or you can choose from the New York Stock Exchange which has its own NYSE web-site. Choose the stocks from different areas if you can: some technology stocks, some agricultural stocks, some mining stocks, some industrial stocks.

    In your journal, every day for a month, record the selling prices of the stocks you have selected.

    At the end of the month, draw a graph of the stock prices, using a different color for each stock. Use the horizontal axis for "days" and the vertical axis for "dollars". (This should give you a series of dots, each dot representing the price of a given stock on a given day. For each stock, connect its dots with straight lines.)

    Do you recognize a pattern in overall stock behavior? Do you recognize a pattern in the behavior of stocks from the same area?

    Use the data you have generated to estimate what the prices of your ten stocks will be: in one day, in one week, in two weeks, in three weeks, in one month. Write down your estimates, and over the course of the next month check the accuracy of your predictions (my advice is to keep your money in your pocket while you do this.)

    Do you think the stock exchange is a chaotic system?