Introduction
Today’s stock market offers as many opportunities for investors to raise money as jeopardies to lose it because market depends on different factors, such as overall observed country’s performance, foreign countries’ performance, and unexpected events. One of the most important stock market indexes is Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) as it comprises the 500 largest American companies across various industries and sectors. Many people put their money into the market to get return on investment. Investors ask themselves questions like how to make money on the stock market and is there a way to predict in some degree how the stock market will behave? There are lots and lots of variables involved in how the stock market behaves at a specific time. The stock market is in a way an information agency. Based on new information, whether good or bad regarding almost everything from political issues to interest rates and inflation, the stock market can go up or down. The market is anticipating economic occurrences proactively, ignoring already occurred events that were predicted before. This way it is very hard to predict how it is going to move in the future. As S&P 500 is considered to be the most reliable benchmark for the overall U.S. stock market, we decided to study what factor has the most impact on it. We created two regression models and included the economic indicators, such as Consumer Price Index, Producer Price Index, House Price index, Interest Rate, Unemployment Rate, and Gross Domestic Product of some countries.
Model Specification and Data How accurately can we predict the stock market behavior? People working in the finance industry have been trying to estimate or predict the behavior of stock market for a long time, or maybe some of them already have a very long and complex model of predicting the behavior of a stock market based on many factors and variables. We decided
References: 1. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html 2. Federal Housing Finance Agency Web Site 3. U.S. Department of Commerce: Bureau of Economic Analysis Web Site 4. U.S. Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics Web Site 5. mhttp://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/SP500/downloaddata?cid=32255