Buy an essay on Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is an international corporation founded by Sam Walton in 1962. Since that time it has grown into a chain of large department stores, including department stores, combination discount and grocery stores. Besides the US, Wal-Mart Stores is operating internationally: this company is the largest retailer in Canada and Mexico; it operates in Asia, Europe and South America. The aim of this essay is to analyze the situation concerning Wal-Mart financial position and the efficiency of investing into Wal-Mart Stores via equity futures.
An equity future is in fact a contract where it is agreed to buy or cell a specified amount of a separate equity, or a basket of equities at a certain date and for a contract-agreed price. Equity futures can be divided into two types: index future id bought or sold on a specified date, and stock future is based on the stock price and the value of the future contract is usually settled in stock.
The expediency of investing into equity futures of Wal-Mart is defined by the perspectives of its stock price. The analysis of 5 year dynamics of stock prices for Wal-Mart is presented below.

Figure 1. Stock volume of Wal-Mart (WMT) during May 2005 – May 2010 (finance.yahoo.com)

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The analysis can be considered basing on the trends of stocks only, and can be broadened by studying the perspectives of retailers during the downturn times and new strategies of Wal-Mart. It is reasonable to perform quantitative analysis at first. During 2005-2007, Wal-Mart stocks remained relatively stable; however, there was neither growth, nor decline. The lowest selling value was $42.39, somewhere around September 2007. Since the middle of 2007 there was a significant rise during approximately one year, which took place, in my opinion, mostly due to Wal-Mart expansion, strategy of entering international market and rebranding.

After the highest point in September 2008, when selling price was $62.41, the price has slightly fallen. However, the tendency for increasing the trend value stock price can be witnessed since the summer of 2009. Thus, from the point of view of pure quantitative analysis, it is worth to invest into equity futures concerning Wal-Mart: it will not offer superrevenues like newly emerging companies, but it will allow to preserve savings and gain a certain amount of money (in the inflation does not exceed the pace of growth).
Let us perform qualitative analysis. The stock prices of Wal-Mart are not growing quickly, but the returns are good. In the period of economical downturn, Wal-Mart may experience loss of revenues; however, it is offering strategies against this situation: there is a tendency for creating small locations, especially in urban areas, where online customers may pick their purchases. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is still offering one of the best price and discount systems. Also, the company is developing its international sector. In my opinion, such combination of strategies might enable the company to use the downturn period for generating more revenue than usual.
On the other hand, customers are seeking ways of cutting costs, and from this point of view, more rapid development will be experienced by a) newly emerged companies which use all means to attract customers and b) purely online shops which have less costs per item. Thus, for bigger and faster revenues, it is better to choose companies like Costco Wholesale, or Amazon.com. At the same time, investing into these companies will be more risky since Wal-Mart stocks show slow, but stable growth. Taking into account the change in Wal-Mart strategy, it is possible to state that it has remained an attractive company for investment, in equity options in particular.