Jones Leadership Academy and Junior Achievement hosted a stock market challenge, teaching students to manage portfolios.
TOLEDO, Ohio — Wall Street came to Toledo Wednesday.
Students at Jones Leadership Academy in central Toledo learned how to make wise investments through a stock market challenge.
The students were tasked with managing a $1 million portfolio by investing in stocks and seeing how it grows over time.
Senior Lathan Fitzpatrick had a leg up on the competition.
“I’m not a bragger, but yes, I did win it last year,” Fitzpatrick said.
He stuck with a simple strategy.
“Teamwork. You’ve got to work together,” he said.
While the students weren’t investing real money in real stocks, they did take the competition seriously.
There are four students on a team who all played a different role, including gathering news on companies, watching the ticker and working with an investor to find promising stocks.
Each minute of trading counted as a day, trading for a total of 60 minutes or 60 days.
Junior Achievement of Northwestern Ohio put on the event.
“We want to show them an opportunity where they can invest in themselves over time,” marketing and event manager, Julia Simon said. “We’re not teaching them how to day trade and make money quick, but really to learn to invest in themselves for their future.”
Senior Olivia Jackson was a member of Group 27. She played the game in years past and this year her team did their homework.
“My classmate went and looked up things last night to study and learn the equations on how to divide to find out how much money we were going to get for stocks,” Jackson said. “So we had a group chat to where we were studying last night.”
The students say this exercise, not from a textbook, is teaching them concepts they’ll take with them after they graduate.
“This is definitely going to help in making sure I have enough to pursue my dreams,” Fitzpatrick said. “I’m getting a Bachelor of Science eventually and I’m going to need all the money I can get so that way these goals can be achieved.”
“Learning now, we’ll know how to spend our money, how to be smart about it and we won’t go broke,” senior Jasmine Evans said.
The team that made its money grow the most after two rounds of trading took home bragging rights.
“They work a lot in their class to learn how to invest so for them to be able to put it into action, I think it’s really beneficial and it connects the learning in the classroom to how it applies in real life,” Simon said.
VIDEO FROM LAST YEAR’S EVENT:
