Financial Market Commentary

One week ago, on May 8, we implemented the trades suggested by our student analysts from Spring 2012. Based on a sluggish call on the US economy (link here), which they published in February 2012, the students recommended reducing exposure to the materials, energy and consumer discretionary sectors by selling our positions in:

• Nucor (NUE)
• Schlumberger (SLB)
• Lowes (LOW).

The student analysts also recommended increasing our exposure to the information technology sector by initiating new long positions in:

• Microsoft (MSFT)
• Accenture (ACN).

The chart below shows the performance of the student recommendations. After the first week of trading, our 2 new long positions in MSFT and ACN are outperforming our 3 sell recommendations, which are all in negative territory.