Hawk team is 1st in state, 3rd in nation
Four Hampton Hawks high schoolers surprised their business teacher and perhaps even themselves recently when they won the state competition in Junior Achievement’s annual Stock Market Challenge. And they continued their winning ways by taking fourth place in the national contest on May 10.
Hampton business teacher Jeremy Jones formed two teams from the nine students in this year’s Intro to Business class and entered them in the statewide competition held in late April. While most of the teams participated in person at Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln for the event, the Hampton students were among the approximately 200 participants who played virtually. One of the teams, consisting of Shae Kingery, Sophia Schulze, Jacob Wishman and Kennedy McCullough, came out first in the state and qualified for the national competition.
In the contest, which takes just over an hour, each team is given an amount of virtual money which it uses to buy and trade stocks over a period of 60 trading days. For the competition a day is less than a minute long, so Jones says students have to think fast.
“Especially in the national, it’s really fast-paced so the kids had to try to keep on top of things to try to stay with the news and keep up with everything,” said Jones, “and you had to get the trades in (before the end of the simulated trading day).”
Jones said he only had a week’s notice about the national contest, so he had to call back the two seniors on the team who had already graduated and try to prepare them to compete against hundreds of teams from across the nation.
The day of the national contest, in which the team again participated virtually, the students had only 45 seconds for each trading day and took a break at the 30 day mark. At that point, Jones says the Hawks team was “towards the very bottom” of the leader board.
“The kids came up with a different strategy based on a stock that paid dividends,” he said, “so to try to get back up, they put all the money into that one stock and it paid a huge dividend so that knocked us back up into the top five and then they made some other trades and got us up to number four. I think we missed the third spot by about $2,000 in a portfolio that was worth almost $2 million.”
When asked what makes students from Hampton so savvy about the stock market, Jones replied that team members Kingery and Schulze, especially, showed a natural ability to wade through the information thrown at them rapid fire and make solid decisions about trading stocks.
The good news for the future of the Hawks Stock Market Challenge team is that those two members will be returning next year and others are attracted by the early success of the team.
For winning the state contest, each of the four students received a medal and a $500 scholarship to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the school got a trophy. However, the Hawks missed out on the hardware in the national contest because only the top three teams received trophies.