Examination Results

Summer examination results are now available by email.

Send an email to mrhannon [at] geralds [dot] ie to get your summer exam result.

School Stock Competition – Winner!

Barry in TY is the winner of the second sgcbusiness.com Stock Competition and wins his own copy of Warren Buffett’s biography.

In what was a very close competition, Barry made an overall profit of $86,774 while Ahmed (TY) was second with a profit of $61,507.

The lead changed several times in the last few days of trading with Matthew (TY) leading for several days until the last week of the competition.

Thanks to all those who entered. We will be running a bigger competition next year.

4A6 – Stock Market Evaluation

This online survey is to be completed by all students in 4A6.

Click here to complete the module evaluation.

TY Stock Competition

winnerWell done to Ciarán from 4A3 and John from 4A6 on winning their class Stock Competition.

Each student had €100,000 to invest. Ciarán made a highly impressive profit of €72,000 and John made an excellent profit of €55,000 in just six weeks of trading.

These are the highest returns since we started the stock competitions in 2001.

Click the on the links below to view the winning portfolios.

Maybe we should all ask Ciarán and John for some stock tips?

Ciaran’s Portfolio

John’s Portfolio

Personal Finance Evaluation

The following online survey should be completed by students in 4A1 Personal Finance.

Click here to complete the online evaluation.

The Ideas Campaign

The Ideas CampaignRemember The Ideas Campaign?

They have received over 5,300 ideas from the public on how Ireland can get itself out of recession.

Here are some of the ideas submitted:

  • Abolish state exams in favour of progressive assessment over a two-year period.
  • Add economically relevant subjects to the Leaving Cert.
  • All citizens should have a governmental email address based on their PPS number. Instead of having items posted to the home, individuals can sign up for electronic communications.
  • Change all public lighting to LED devices.
  • Connect every home in the country to a fibre optic network.
  • Allow cars with three or more people to use bus lanes.
  • Abandon the renting of prefabs and build actual school buildings.
  • Utilise unemployed construction workers to work on unfinished and local projects (e.g. schools), and infrastructure.
  • A bridge to the UK would open up Ireland for tourism like never before and gives us direct road access to a market of 60 million people.

They have now put together an Action Plan for Economic Recovery and Renewal and have forwarded this to An Taoiseach Brian Cowen.

Let’s hope they put some of the ideas into action.

You can read more of the ideas submitted or you can download the Action Plan here.

What do you think of the ideas?

Updates on Twitter

Find out who is leading the sgcbusiness.com Stock Competition on our Twitter page. Only $6,000 between first and second place at the moment.

10 days left to go in the competition. You can still join and win!

Google’s tax troubles

Google may be avoiding big tax bills but is the damage to its reputation worth it?

taxAs part of the new world order, or ‘new reality’, both US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown have made it clear that they intend to put pressure on tax havens such as Switzerland, Monaco and Liechtenstein etc.

Broadly speaking, this seems fair, especially where it involves private individuals trying to evade legitimate taxation in their home country. But all this noise about tax havens has given the media a new bête noire . In the case of the UK press, papers such as the Guardian and Times have campaigns to expose companies that seek to avoid paying local taxes. Most recently that attention has fallen upon Google.

According to UK media reports, the company earned stg£1.25 billion for which the tax bill would have been roughly stg£100 million. Instead Google paid just stg£600 thousand by channeling its UK revenues through Ireland. Of course, in the final analysis it can be argued that Google is simply looking out for shareholder value by seeking every legitimate way to minimise its total global tax burden and save money.

Meantime, Google will still need to deal with the practical realities of being exposed for such practices. Whether legal or not, appearances and reputations matter. Even if Google’s tax avoidance is above board, the mere fact that it made so much revenue in the UK yet paid so little in tax, sullies a hard-won reputation.

Expect more pressure to be put on Ireland’s low corporation tax rate of 12.5% to be changed and more talk of tax harmonisation across the EU from Germany and France.

Do you think what Google is doing is wrong?

Source: The above is an article from enn.ie

School Stock Competition

The second sgcbusiness.com Stock Competition is now open for registration.

The competition starts on Friday May 1st and ends on Friday May 22nd.

What are the rules?

  • You have $1m to invest.
  • You can only trade in stocks on the New York stock market.
  • You can sell short.
  • You can set a stop loss on your trades.
  • You may only enter the competition once.
  • You can enter anytime up to Friday May 22nd.
  • There is a prize for the best trader.

How do you enter?

  1. Go to vse.marketwatch.com and register.
  2. Then send an email to vse [at] geralds [dot] ie to get the password to join the game.

It’s that easy. Let’s see can anyone beat the winner of last year’s competition who made a profit of $344,467.

Post any questions you have  in the Comments section of this post.

We are now on Twitter

Twittersgcbusiness.com now has its own Twitter page.

I will be using the Twitter page to post the homework you have each day and to also keep up to date with the latest business news.

Go to our twitter page now and add it to your favourites.

What is Twitter?

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