Saratoga News

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Checking the stock market are Redwood Middle School students (front to back) Julia Gast, Diane Kim and Gianna Leandro.

Stock market gets interest of Redwood's sixth-graders

By John Pancharian

Forget Bill Gates and Ted Turner; there's a new breed of stock-savvy investors around--students at Redwood Middle School.

Sixth-graders in Lisa Vennemeyer's and Barbara Maguire's accelerated math classes participated in the recent California Stock Market Simulation, a game in which more than 400 teams of students from middle and high schools statewide received a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in stocks and mutual funds. California State University, Hayward hosted the 10-week game.

The contest rules required students to invest in at least three different stocks, to invest no more than $25,000 in any one stock and to avoid any stock with a value of less than $5. They also had the option of taking up to a 50 percent margin--that is, borrowing another $100,000 to invest on top of the original $100,000. This method was riskier, though, because if investments made with the margin lost money, students had to pay back not only their losses but also the $100,000 they borrowed.

"We had about eight teams in the top 100," Vennemeyer said. "The best we did was 14th out of 419 teams."

About 15 teams of two, three or four students in both classes checked the newspaper twice weekly to see how their stocks fared, then made trades via the Internet by using the contest Web site.

"Most of the kids were into the big Silicon Valley stocks," Vennemeyer said. She added that when the students heard a stock they owned had gone down, they instantly wanted to sell. Vennemeyer and Maguire encouraged their classes to have patience and look for a stronger signal to sell than a one-day dip. The students also followed the news and tried to make predictions about what their stocks would do.

"At the beginning of the game I didn't know anything about stocks," Shruti Jayakumar, a student in Maguire's class, wrote. "My little sister thinks it's socks you hold to make them go up or down." Like many of the other students, Shruti had sage advice by the time the game was over, though. "I learned that you can lose a lot or make a lot of money. I learned that you should invest your money in big companies when there is a slight dip. [If] you buy it then, it most probably will go up."

"Being able to tie in the math to real-life experience is my goal in playing the game," Vennemeyer said. She explained that mathematically her class had to practice estimating, predicting, fraction-decimal conversions and graphing to play the game, as well as developing soft skills such as cooperative decision-making.

"The only complaint was 'How come we can't do this any longer?' " Vennemeyer said, "If they had their way they'd be on the Net and looking through the paper every class period," she said.

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