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Role Play as Certified Financial Planners

Let's suppose each student in PSY 126 has graduated and become a certified financial planner in either a home or a foreign office of Merrill Lynch.  You have been called together to prepare for a tour across the United States in which you will brief a select group of investors.  These well-to-do adults are/or would become clients of Merrill Lynch (that generate fees and bonuses if they become your personal clients).   

Before you arrive at the Martinsville Public Library for Module 13 Part 2, get ready to complete the following tasks:

Examine the following web sites -

1.   http://www.dogsofthedow.com 

2.   http://www.fool.com/DDow/DDow.htm

Look for the page called "Current Doggishness."

A.  On Module 14.2 the following teams of financial advisors will make
10 to 12 minute presentations to the class.  Each presenter may use only a single 5X7 inch note-card, and/or the use of the Internet and PowerPoint presentation slides, and every team member is to have an equal speaking part.

B.  Each team is to select and identify the four underlined characteristics of its "investment-ready" client below.  (You can invent the specific financial details about the family who is part of your audience.)

B-1  Clients shall be regarded as possessing four characteristics:
1st, they are working or retired adults with sufficient health, disability, and life insurance,
2nd, they have a six-to-nine month emergency cash reserve to sustain themselves through job interruptions,
3rd, they have established successful budgets, income statements, have a positive net worth on their family balance sheet, and have an orderly plan to attain short, medium and long range goals;
4th, clients have 100,000 dollars to invest in the stock market, and have sufficient diversity in cash and bonds, and seeks returns, if possible equal to or higher than the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

C.  Each team is to brief the class on its method of using the Value Line Investment Survey for its research.

C-1  The Value Line Investment Survey is available in two volumes at the Martinsville Public Library on Church Street, and at the Patrick Henry Community College Library on campus. (Class members are free to meet in either library, after class hours, in either Library's meeting room after Module 13 Part One or Part Two, or during class hours for Module 14.1 when class is cancelled in order to give you time to do your research.)

(Your instructor may ask the class to meet in the PHCC library during class hours during Module 13 Part One or during Part Two.  Based on what you learn in the Library, your teams will return to the Library in order to obtain the data necessary to brief the class on companies listed below in yellow.  To allow time for you to prepare, there will be no formal class meeting during Module 14.1.)

D.  Each team  is to recommend, and explains the use of the Dogs of the Dow Theory on the basis of the merits of its past performance. 

E.  During Module 14.2, Each team briefs the class on the Value Line financial/business characteristics of four of the stocks in the this year's Dogs of the Dow theory according to the following schedule:

(Notice that the clients want to hear from two different briefing teams about each stock.  This is a client's method of sizing up who knows what they are talking about, and will influence them in the certified financial planner(s) they choose to implement their decisions.)  In other words, if you and your team do a good job, you can expect to do business; if not, the customers will surely choose a presenter more to their liking.

F.  Class will not meet during Module 14.1. 
Instead, your team should arrange to meet at:

the Martinsville Blue Ridge Public Library, 310 East Church Street (632-7125/2614) or
at the Patrick Henry Community College Library (656-0228) to complete three tasks:

(1)  appoint your team leader,

(2) research the stocks given your team using Value Line Investment Survey, and

(3) divide the requirements of the briefing equitably among your team members.

G.  Each continental briefing team will be called upon to present its findings and recommendations to our select group of clients during Module 14.2 in the classroom on the Patrick Henry Community College campus.