As a senior, I’ve noticed my classmates talking about the same things: college applications, graduation, driving, and their future. However, recently, there’s been more of a hot topic popping up in conversations: the stock market. At the heart of this obsession is the school’s Economics classes, in which students are investing in stocks in an inter-class competition.
The stock market competition is a contest in which students buy stocks of companies, which are fractions of ownership for corporations, to learn about building wealth, social studies teacher Champ Wrencher said. His class is participating in a 12-week stock market competition, in which students start off with $10,000 in fake currency and have to manage a stock portfolio using a virtual broker with real-time data from the stock market, Wrencher said.
“I’ve seen students over the years, just in 12 weeks, turn $10,000 into $15,000,” Wrencher said. “And so, they use that as a stepping stone so they understand that in real life, if you have $10,000 in disposable income, they can draw back on this experience. But, of course, they understand the risk associated with that.”
Wrencher competes with his students and his placings have varied over the years, from top 10 to dead last, Wrencher said. Wrencher does small-time investing in his free time, and uses the contest to do homework on his own portfolio, he said.
“When you are financially independent, you can start investing at an earlier age,” Wrencher said. “I myself didn’t start until 10 years ago, but I wish I had known more about this stuff when I was in high school, or even during my college years, because I always think, the younger you are, the more energy and creative spirit you have. I want the kids to be able to utilize all this information at a younger age so they can increase their chances of being prosperous.”
Senior Mark Daniel Zarate is a student in one of Wrencher’s economics classes, and is first place out of 25 students, Zarate said. Initially, he started investing by looking into companies he already knew, such as Amazon, Apple, Sony, and NVIDIA, but lost a lot of money at the start by only investing in NVIDIA, Zarate said. Later on, he learned more about other stock techniques, like shorting a stock, where you borrow shares of a stock you believe will decrease in value, and using a stop sell, which is where a stock is automatically sold if it falls to a certain price, Zarate added.
“A lot of people would probably not like my strategy,” Zarate said. “I go on Yahoo Finance and look at the trending tickers for small companies that went up 200% or 100% in their stock value, and then I short them. Then, the following day, they would drop down to what they originally were, and I made my money that way.”
Aden Tran and Virgina Flores are participating in a separate stock market competition for social studies teacher James Williams’ class and are currently in third and seventh place respectively, Tran said in an interview. In Williams’s class, each student has $50,000 in virtual money to start out with, and has to write a report about certain companies they follow for investments, Tran said.
“I bought Target, Costco, and Walmart,” Flores said in an interview. “I’m just sticking with those because I was thinking about the future. Christmas is coming up, and I believe that those companies will probably make the most money.”
The virtual stock market competition taught them that even investing a small share into a company can help make a lot of money, Flores said. The competition also taught them how chaotic the stock market can be, Flores said.
“One day, I was all the way at 18th place, and then the next day I checked, and I was in third place,” Flores said. “Don’t invest all your money in one company, because you never know if that company could go up or down, and you could lose all of your money. It can be a gamble.”
