Two Lake Tahoe School students recently took top honors in the Nevada Council on Economic Education-sponsored The Stock Market Game™. The 7th grade students – Christian Busse and Aiden Vieara-McCarthy – took first place among more than 1,300 Nevada students representing 188 competing teams. They took top honors in the middle school division, and won top place among all other competing students grades 4th through 12th. This is the third time a Lake Tahoe School team has finished in the top three finishers in their respective categories.

Busse and Vieara-McCarthy created a portfolio which outperformed the S&P 500 by 26.61% over a nine (9) week period this spring.

“Our best performing stock was Tesla, which we spent a lot of time shorting along with Etsy, which we didn’t really spend much time on but should have. Our worst performing stock in equity was Microsoft. Our worst performing stock by percent was Salesforce,” commented Vieara-McCarthy. “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.”

Busse shared some insights into their investment experiment. “Best can be relative. Apple offered best cash return but Royal Caribbean Cruises provided a better percentage return. 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.”

The Stock Market Game™ was led by Patrick Fleming, middle school math teacher at Lake Tahoe School. This is the sixth year that Fleming has built teams to compete in the contest. “The Game is a great way to increase valuable skills such as data analysis and project-based learning. It is the highlight of the year in math for some students, and for most students, it is their first exposure to the stock market,” commented Fleming.

Students are provided with a $100,000 “balance” to create their portfolios then must complete portfolio analysis and insight at the end of the investment session. Registration to compete in The Game is free for schools.

For more information:

Nevada Council on Economic Education: Ryan Pietranton
The Stock Market Game