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Student stock pickers reveal their secrets

If you are looking for some tips and strategies on how to successfully play the stock market, look no further than one local elementary school.

Peeples Elementary students Brock Peters, Dylan Autera and Travis Harris are the fall 2004 statewide winners of the Georgia Stock Market Game. In just 10 weeks, they turned a $100,000 investment into over $187,600. The students were honored May 3 at a special luncheon at the Georgia Freight Depot in Atlanta where 120 teams from across the state picked up awards.

In the Stock Market Game, students invest a hypothetical $100,000 in stocks in an online simulation. While the money is pretend, the market movements are not, and teachers use the excitement to teach real lessons about economics and personal finance. The game lasts 10 weeks and is played during the fall and spring of each year by students from across the state.

Brock said his team’s strategy was to buy low and sell high, keeping their stock purchases between $5-10 a share.

“We were the only team that adopted this strategy at our school,” Brock said.

Brock said his team picked investment companies by using the stock screener function at Yahoo Finance, researching company profiles and studying their charts. The team invested heavily in kidney dialysis and steel companies with their largest moneymakers being Highveld Steel and Dialysis Corporation of America. Although the team carefully scrutinized each purchase, the students did make a few mistakes along they way that almost left them with a big loss instead of a big win.

“We intended to buy 3,000 shares of Highveld Steel but we accidentally typed in an extra zero and ended up with 30,000 shares of the stock. The next week, when we realized what we did, we panicked because the share prices had gone down and our portfolio showed we had lost a lot of money plus we had mistakenly borrowed $80,000,” Brock explains.

He and his teammates were ready to sell and take a big loss when their teachers recommended that they wait and see if we they could regain their money.

“We did and the stock prices went up and up and up,” he said.

Before playing the Stock Market Game, Brock said he had no idea of what stocks were and wondered why people cared so much about the graphs on television and in the newspaper. His success with the market has left him wanting more.

“Because of this experience, I plan to buy stocks when I’m older. And if I can talk my parents into it, I’d like to get started now,” he said.