By Matt de Simone Contributing writer
The fall sessions of Virginia’s 2018-19 Stock Market Game concluded and the results are in: Botetourt County has some savvy student investors.
Photo by Aila Boyd
This past Thursday evening at the Botetourt County School Board meeting, the board recognized a group of Botetourt County students from the middle and elementary school level for their placement in the fall session of the Stock Market Game.
The game is simple. Students are “given” $100,000 to invest in whatever companies they deem fit for their hard-earned monies. They work with a financial adviser, or in this case, Karen Busher, Botetourt County’s Gifted Resource teacher. The Virginia Council on Economic Education provides the kids with an online investment portfolio and the game begins. Cafeteria conversations used to consist of arguments over the strongest Avengers team members. For these students, they stew over the choice to invest in Nike or Adidas, Chevrolet or Ford, Amazon or the company that manufactures Amazon’s shipping materials, or all of the above.
Four teams from Botetourt County elementary schools threw their hats into the competition against young traders from other elementary, middle, and high schools across the state— 738 teams in total. As it turns out, local students have an eye (and intuition) on how to stay above the red on Wall Street.
Megan Lusk, Sarah Johnson, Jenna Overstreet, and Ava George— fifth grade students at Troutville Elementary— placed higher in the statewide competition than any other students in their division (15th overall) earning first place honors at the elementary level. The only teams that placed higher than Troutville were high schoolers.
Lusk told the citizens in attendance that one of the products their team invested in was Nike. She added, “[Nike] went down, but thank goodness we only [invested in] 10 shares.” Somewhere in New York City, a hot-shot investor probably took a bath in 20 shares or more. He should’ve talked to Megan Lusk.
The Troutville Elementary students had their own reasons for their team’s success. Overstreet stated, “The reason why I think we won is because one of the Barnes & Nobles stores we invested in got us a little over $100. We bought 50 shares and it made us a lot of money.” Shrewd. Who would think to invest in a bookstore in 2019?
The fifth graders’ biggest stock purchase was in Graham Holdings. George explained, “We bought fifteen shares and made over $1,000.”
Busher added that she gives the students an idea about the risks and rewards of investing in the market but the kids are left to decide how they spend their monies. “What is interesting about this group is that they found some data on Graham Holdings,” Busher explained. “They saw Warren Buffett had purchased stock in that company so they went ahead and bought shares.” Busher later revealed she believed it was the investment in Graham Holdings which led to the fifth graders’ success in the Stock Market game.
While some teams chose Netflix and Amazon, these young day traders went with an unconventional approach which earned them a whopping $101,554.00 (+$1,554). The first-place team from Gloucester High School earned $107,137.37. That’s nearly a $7,000 difference between earnings. Not bad for a pack of wheeling, dealing fifth graders.
Joining the elementary school winners, Central Academy Gifted Resource teachers, Ashley Theimer and Daryl Hilton, introduced local middle school students Emma Lester, Hayley Harris, and Kylie Mills who placed first out of 100 teams in their region of middle school students. One of the students considered this contest to be “an amazing opportunity. I think we all learned a lot from this experience.”
The spring session of Virginia’s 2018-19 Stock Market game is now under way. For more information, visit the Virginia Council on Economic Education’s website (vcee.org).