“Basis point” isn’t a term that the average middle schooler knows. But seventh graders Christian Busse and Aiden Vieara-McCarthy of Lake Tahoe School (NV) certainly do after taking first place among all middle and high school students in Nevada who competed in The Stock Market Game™, an online simulation of the global capital markets. The game, a program of the SIFMA Foundation and supported by the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, engages students in grades 4–12 in the world of economics, investing, and personal finance. It is offered for free to schools across the country and is sponsored in Nevada by the Nevada Council on Economic Education.In Nevada, the competition took place online from February to April 2020 with 1,300 students representing 188 teams from middle and high schools. Each group, which ranged from two to six players, started with a $100,000 “balance” to create virtual portfolios, which they managed during the competition.
This is the second time in six years of competing that middle school math teacher Patrick Fleming has overseen a first place overall winning team. To prepare, students learned in class the basics of tracking a single stock on a weekly basis using a curriculum available on The Stock Market Game™ website. Throughout the competition, Busse and Vieara-McCarthy continued to learn alongside their middle school classmates about short selling, leveraged funds, capital gains, market trends, and more. The students’ portfolio performed the best over the course of the competition.
“‘Best’ can be relative. Apple offered the best cash return, but Royal Caribbean Cruises provided a better percentage return,” says Busse about their investment strategies. “Interestingly, standards such as Nike and Salesforce were not great picks. I don’t want to give away our strategy, but the key to winning this year was picking stocks that did not correlate with the rest of the market.”
Vieara-McCarthy adds, “This year’s Stock Market Game™ indicated that, under certain circumstances, short-selling strategies can be more profitable and even safer than buy-and-hold strategies.”
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