The trio of Benjamin Moorhouse ’26, Jet Dickerson ’26, and Ethan Na ’26 conquered their opponents at the Ithaca College High School Stock Market Competition and took top prize. Teams composed of 3-7 student members from 9^th to 12^th Grades from 500+ teams/schools received $1,000,000 in virtual US dollars to build a portfolio using real-world investment tactics that consisted of between five and 20 stocks. Students learned basic principles of the stock market, various sectors, and fundamentals of real-time trading. At the conclusion of the competition, awards were given to the top three earning portfolios – and GA’s team won $3,000! The team searched for finance competitions and came across the Ithaca College competition as one of four large stock trading contests.

“The competition was fun and challenging, specifically due to the negative returns of the overall market due to recent world events,” said the group. “As a team, we beat the market by more than 100% (the market returned -19% while we returned 87%). We all find predicting the market to be interesting and a challenge and doing it as a team made it more fun during discussions.”

Even though the team found much success, they probably won’t be using their own money any time soon. “When trading in a competition, you must trade at an extremely risky level,” the group stated. “The behavior would not be beneficial to investing real money because we only care about the magnitude of the investment and the direction instead of proper risk analysis. However, we learned some important lessons about how events and the news impact the stock market, which is vital for proper wealth management in our future.”