Comment by WhompingWindows
5 years ago
Tangential story: When I was in middle school, we had a computers class where we had a mock stock-buying competition. Each team of 4 students was given a pretend 10,000 dollars to invest in the market, and then we could buy/sell throughout the semester and whoever was left with the most equity would win.
We 7th graders didn't know which company to buy and our teacher told us we had 1 minute left to choose a stock. We looked around the room and I saw the calculator in front of us. "Oh great, let's go with Texas Instruments, TI, everyone has one of their calculators!"...So, we bought $10,000 of "TI", which turned out to be "Telecom Italia", an Italian phone company...
...which actually did REALLY well, we were nationally ranked in the game after a couple of weeks, but TI ended up tanking for whatever reason and we lost in the end.
My elementary school had a similar thing in (I believe) a math class I was in. I recall that we were given newspapers with a list of stock prices and were in groups. I can't recall if we were given any lesson on how the stock market worked. We had fairly little time to pick stocks. I'm not sure that I learned anything other than to actually know what you're doing if you're going to invest in random stocks.
The people whose lucky guesses paid off probably learned a different lesson.