Assignment 1: Stock Investment Analysis
FIN 355 – Financial Risk Analysis
November 7. 2015
1 Asses the year-to-date performance of the FLCSX fund, including the key drivers of the fund performance, and how the performance of the fund compares to the S&P 500.
Fidelity Large Cap Stock Fund (FLCSX) began in June of 1995 and is currently run by Matthew Fruhan since May 2005. Fruhan has a strong long-term track record that demonstrates a clearly defined strategy for picking securities. The fund is an actively managed since its inception. The fund is classified as a large blend fund and falls under the large capitalization growth category. With a 36% turnover rate with 2.9 Billion is total assets. A minimum of $2,500 initial investment is needed for this fund. You can find large-cap stock funds in most retirement 401K plans. In general when one thinks about stocks they think about large-cap stocks first. This comes from the heavily publicized indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor’s 500. Despite the large cap appeal, FLCSX does not make the top rankings in U.S. News World Report (US New & World Report, 2015). Year to date the fund is up 0.94% and the S&P is down -2.81%. Overall FLCSX is doing a better job than the S&P in the difficult economy holding 8 of the 10 top stocks on the S&P 500 stocks. Performance has been better than the S&P 500 for ten years running and earns a Silver based rating from Morningstar. (Morningstar, 2015).
Driving Fidelity’s Large Cap Stock funds core competence is under the finance, capital and equity market where it invests at least 80% of all its assets in companies that have a growth rate that’s above average with high growth potential. The top major companies in FLSCX are JP Morgan, GE, Apple, Bank of America, Citigroup, Microsoft, Target, Google Class A, Proctor and Gamble, Comcast, and Qualcomm. Google, GE, and Microsoft posting the biggest year to date earnings....