Math project help!!! Stock market?

[Cristen]

so i have this math project to do and i know nothing about the stock market. i just need help to know how to do this.
Your task today is to make 3 million out of 200 000 by using the stock market. you can buy whatever stocks you choose to. you must have at least 8 companies and at least 4 different types of companies. you can go back up to 10 years. you must show your work and make sure that you can demonstrate that you can generate 3 million.
an example of this would be greatly appreciated. please help.

[Hollerith]

Do you know of anything with a price that goes up and down? Gasoline does this, and you can see it because gas stations post the price outside and it changes frequently.

Well, companies are sold in little pieces called shares, and the prices bounce up and down constantly.
When a company is doing well (making money, lots of sales) its price tends to go up.
When a company is doing poorly its price tends to go down.

So, what you need to do is buy something LOW and sell it HIGH.

Companies are listed by abbreviated names, but some are easy to recognize:
IBM
KO -- Coca Cola
MSFT -- Microsoft
TWTR - Twitter
GOOG -- Google

So, to make money, you buy IBM at 100 (i.e. $100.00 per share) and wait for it to go up.
If it goes up to 115 and you sell then, you have made 15%
If you bought one share you made $15.
If you bought 1000 shares you made $15,000.

You can see current prices at
fidelity.com
At that site (not always the same) you should see a little box that says "Quotes".
Put the company abbreviation in there and press enter and it will show the current price.
The little box that comes up also contains a graph that you can set as far back as 5 years (I think).

Yahoo Finance also shows this kind of data.

Go play with it. You will find tons of information and data.

UPDATE

One other thing --
Apparently what they want you to do is go back in time, find something that rose in price, and pretend you bought it.

For example,
you could have bought IBM for 100 in 2009
and
you could have sold it for 200 in 2012.