He's having you select your own portfolio and compare its success against the S&P's performance. Just track the closing share price of your stocks and you'll be calculating the return in class, as compared to S&P. If you pick well, you should be able to beat the market's growth relative to share price.

ETF = Exchange Traded Fund

SPY = ticker symbol for a particular ETF that tracks the S&P500 index

Go to fidelity.com and use their search engine

So we have to pic 10 stocks from S&P 500 and follow them, during opening and closing. Wrtie down the data with excel.

But I need clarification for a few things.

The professor said "Track the closing prices and then we will graph the portfolio versus the SPY and we will calculate the return over the holding period. Remember to keep track of the ETF with the Symbol SPY. We are going to measure the performance of our portfolios relative to the SPY."

Can someone please explain what he means and how I do this? The professor does not reply.

What is ETF and SPY?