BY DIMITRI MELETIS
Back in February, finance students from schools across Broward County gathered at the JA World Huizenga Center in Coconut Creek to participate in the annual Junior Achievement Stock Market Challenge. At this event, students in teams of three represent their schools and engage in an hour of fast-paced simulated stock trading. Whoever comes out with the highest valued portfolio wins.
CCHS had an incredibly successful run at this year’s stock market challenge, taking home the first place trophy and occupying four spots in the top five by the end of the hour. On March 20, a celebratory breakfast was held in the media center to acknowledge the victory and take a photo with the new trophy.
The first place team consisted of four juniors: Landry Chang, Diego Rosales, Yao Peng Zhao and Winson Cheung. This group, under the team name “Kureki”, finished the competition with a final score of $797,849, which was over $100,000 more than the runner up.
When it came to helpful strategies, the team emphasized their focus on the “hot tips” that were distributed between time intervals during the event, which gave public business updates that helped point players to the right direction of trade.
“When they had hot tips, you wanted to get a trader right away. They help you predict how company stocks will either increase in value or go down, but it doesn’t exactly tell you so you have to make an inference and use it to your advantage,” Junior Landry Chang said.
Personal Finance Teacher Mr. Herrera ensured to go over general knowledge about trading stocks and risk tolerance with students before they went out and participated in the competition.
“Understanding the idea that this is like a casino, in the sense that you could lose money. So you’ve got to be careful on how much you invest and where you invest,”
Herrera said. “I think what’s true for all of my students is that they understood what [trading] was, and just did a good job executing.”
As a result of their effective preparation, both the students and teachers were able to walk away from the event with high placements and exciting energy.
“It’s awesome. Four out of the top five, I mean, craziness you know?” Personal Finance Teacher Mr. Cardinale said. “You had the team that won it all and all the other teams that did well, it was just a good experience.”
The competition is not over yet, however. Kureki are now set to travel to Atlanta and represent CCHS in a larger scaled version of this stock market competition. Right after they were notified, the team already got to preparing.
“We know the rules already so we’re going in informed,” Junior Diego Rosales said.
Chang followed up on that comment as well. “Yeah, we already did some research on it. The moment we won we wanted to know what the next step was.”
