Skinner fourth-grade team wins regional, statewide Stock Market Game

A team of fourth-graders from Skinner Elementary School made bigger gains in the Stock Market Game this semester than any other team in Texas, turning a hypothetical $100,000 into a nifty $165,128.54 to win both the regional and statewide competition.

Stated another way, Diego Lopez, Axel Ramirez, Katherine Beltran, Lessly Garza and Jenniffer Prieto ended up with a higher equity total than any of the 2,469 other teams in Texas — including high school and middle school teams.

“What do you think? I’m proud of my students. It’s exciting,” their teacher, Esmeralda Herrera, said when asked how it felt to have her students win a state championship. Herrera was notified Monday that hers was the top team, meaning each member and herself will get a $100 cash prize.

The students themselves said the best part was beating Skinner’s fifth-grade SMG team, which as recently as two weeks ago had been in first place among all Texas teams.

The Stock Market Game, which started in 1977, is a proven and fun way to teach math, science and financial literacy through a competition based hypothetical trading on actual U.S. financial markets.

Locally, The Brownsville Herald and Valley Federal Credit Union sponsor the SMG. Statewide, CW Properties, LLC sponsors $100 cash prizes for each member of the winning team and their faculty sponsor.

Teams start with a hypothetical $100,000 and build a portfolio of stocks, bonds and mutual funds based on their own research. Teams trade equities on the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq national market and American Stock Exchange. They earn interest on cash balances, pay interest if buying on margin and pay a commission on all trades.

Each semester’s game lasts 60 days. Early in the game the winning team decided that it would buy and sell Exchange Traded Funds or ETFs, which are volatile but can go up or down in triple increments.

Right before Thanksgiving, the team decided to buy a “short” position in financials on the New York Stock Exchange because the market was going down.

“When we came back we changed it to ‘long.’ We took a team vote and we all decided ‘long,’ or bullish. It was very risky,” Katherine explained.

It turned out to be a shrewd move because the week after Thanksgiving U.S. stock markets gained 7 percent and the students got the big gain they needed to win the game.

“There was some luck, too,” Skinner principal Kim Moore cautioned. “They really weren’t sure.”

Moore and the students explained some of the ways the Stock Market Game helps students learn how things work.

Starting with a theoretical pizza parlor, the class learned that if their business were successful they might be able to expand it at one location by getting friends to loan them money. But to expand to 50 locations would require a bank loan.

Getting any bigger than that would require them to sell stock in their company. From that base, the students acquired a basic understanding of how financial markets operate, Moore said.

The students also learned about companies traded on the NYSE and other markets by doing research and studying quarterly reports.

Now they know the facts about Nike tennis shoes, Sony televisions and video games, Dell computers, the Burlington Coat Factory, Old Navy, Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson and other companies, the students said.

They also found out that political news influences financial markets around the world.

For example, President Barack Obama’s decision to place U.S. backing behind efforts to restructure European financial markets and revive the Euro triggered a 480-point rally in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Nov. 30 that was key to big market gains last week — and the Skinner fourth-grade team winning this semester’s SMG.

Earlier, Moore said that Skinner’s two SMG teams are sharing what they’re learning with other classes at the school. Moore plans to have this year’s fourth-grade team teach next year’s teams how to play the game.

“If you get them doing the math, then you get them aware of the world,” he said. “They’re figuring out how things work ... and then they go around and present it to the others. I’ve got five kids from the fourth grade and four from the fifth going around and teaching the other kids financial awareness of the world.”

The top three teams from each semester will be honored at an awards ceremony at the end of the school year, SMG officials said.

glong@brownsvilleherald.com