Plum High School student Eli Pollak has a financial strategy.
“The earlier you start, like at our age, investing, the more money you will make,” said Pollak, who attended the Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania Stock Market Challenge presented by Citizens on Thursday, Dec. 12 at Stage AE on Pittsburgh’s North Shore.
It was an event held to empower students with real-world financial literacy skills.
Stage AE was set up like a stock market with a board showing the stock prices similar to the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest stock market on earth, where matches are made between buyers and sellers trading shares of public companies.
In this live trading simulation, students formed teams to compete in maximizing their investments, strategizing in response to the ups and downs of a simulated market.
There was buying, selling, trading and some tense moments.
A bell was rung just like is done to open the daily stock market on Wall Street.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were on the line. Fortunately, this wasn’t real money.
The morning included an interactive competition, bringing the trading floor to life.
This was the first time for such an event in Pittsburgh.
“This is what Junior Achievement does across the country,” said Patrice Matamoros, president of the Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania. “We help with real-life skills. What we do here is an extension of what they are learning in the classroom.”
That includes managing money through stocks, which was the lesson of the day.
There were 108 teams and 385 students from Allegheny, Beaver, Cambria, Indiana, Somerset and Westmoreland counties and Brooke and Hancock counties in West Virginia.
Each team began with $500,000. They came prepared with a portfolio of fake company stocks.
They were presented with various scenarios. Their portfolio might include companies such as Donut House, a global donut and coffee chain, and Nichols Sporting Goods, an American manufacturer of sports equipment.
Al DiFranco, president and CEO at Junior Achievement of Greater Cleveland, would announce information such as the price of coffee beans on the rise. If the students owned Donut House stock, they might want to make a decision what to do with the stock.
And they didn’t have a lot of time because, for this competition, one minute was equal to one day.
“This JA Stock Market Challenge is about the stock market, but also about financial literacy and wellness and investing wisely,” DiFranco said. “When you work on Wall Street, you have to constantly be paying attention because the stock market can change in a minute.”
Gretchen Weber, a marketing, business, accounting, law and finance teacher at Plum, said it was a great opportunity for students to learn about stocks and how to handle money. She brought five teams and 16 students.
Sophomore Caydence Morgan said there was so much happening all at once.
“This is so important to learn about investing in our future,” Morgan said.
Classmate Sophia Tedesco said the morning was pretty stressful and everything was happening so quickly. Learning good money management is important, Tedesco said.
Morgan and Plum junior Gianna Sciulli won an award for sharing their experience on social media.
Winners of the stock market challenge were Peters Township High School students Laci and Lexi Vance, both first-year students, and their older brother Wyatt Vance, a junior. The prizes were $500 for the first-place team, $300 for the second, and $25 gift cards for each player on the third-place team.
Peters Township finished with $662,000 total.
Wyatt has been studying the stock market since he was 9 years old. He has read a lot of books about stocks and said, in real life, in the blink of an eye you can go from the top to the floor so you have to always be aware of what is going on in the world.
Pollak agreed.
“The stock market really gets your adrenaline pumping,” Pollak said. “You have to pay attention to what’s happening around you every second.”