The College of Business at PVAMU recently completed its inaugural high school stock challenge and is set to host its Young Investor Symposium in conjunction with the award ceremony on Saturday, December 8, 2018

The university hosted 200 high school students from 21 high schools in the greater Houston area in the eight-week online stock trading competition, which lasted from September 24th through November 16th. Each student team was comprised of three to four high school sophomore or senior students supervised by high school advisors manage a virtual portfolio of $500,000 to invest in stocks and ETFs. Students learned about stocks and the stock market through online tutorials and hands-on experience of trading. Each high school student who participated will receive a certificate of participation and the top three teams with the highest portfolio returns at market that closed on November 16th will receive cash prizes of $1,000, $800 and $500, respectively.

The first-place winning team was from Nimitz High School, which made a return of 9.8% while the market was down by 6.7% during the challenge period. The second-place winning team was from George Ranch High School and the third-place winning team came from the Young Women’s College Prep Academy.

“Our aim was to expose young students to investments through this challenge, and peak their interest in learning how the stock market works,” said Yi Zhang, associate professor of finance, PVAMU College of Business. “We hope this challenge will not only help improve the financial literacy of young students, but also help the College of Business build relationships with local high schools to promote financial literacy education.”

The Symposium is open to both PVAMU students and invited high school students. Registration starts at 9:30 a.m. that day in the lobby of the Agriculture/Business Multipurpose Building. The symposium will include a panel discussion in the morning and break-out sessions in the afternoon before concluding with the high school stock challenge award ceremony. Panelists from Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch and the CFA Institute will be in attendance to discuss investments and trading for students. The break-out sessions include trading room demonstrations from Bloomberg, StockTrak, Investment Club, Finance Club, Panther of Forex, among others.

By Emilia Benton