Three eighth-grade students at Lake Tahoe School bested a field of 56 teams, most of them high school students, to win first place in the Nevada Stock Market game this year. Another team of Lake Tahoe School students finished in ninth place.

It was Lake Tahoe School’s second top-three finish in three years of competing in the Nevada Stock Market game. The winning LTS team consisted of students Cody Reeth, Brenda Martinez-Ruiz, and Jada Moore. Finishing in ninth place was the LTS team composed of students Brian Wiebe, Roxanne Reed, and Riley Rau.

“They actually have a trading platform, so they have to enter, buy, sell, short, long, determine how many shares they want of each company, and track a lot of data in an engaging and meaningful way,” said LTS math teacher Mr. Patrick Fleming.

“These are valuable skills that students certainly won’t use right away, but that could be very helpful to them down the road in life. The goal is for them to become familiar with stocks and the stock market, and work in some math skills: percentage changes, graphing and so on.”

Cody Reeth, who will be attending prestigious Davidson Academy in Reno next year, said that the secret to his team’s first-place success was in thinking strategically about technologies that are helping improve people’s lives, as well as in being highly vigilant in tracking statistics on a daily basis.

“I checked our stocks every day. Our big stock was iRobot – we bought it with our virtual money for the stock market game, and it nearly doubled in value,” said Reeth.