Tuesday, July 25, 2000
Student investors hit the road
Pupils to meet SEC head
By Sue Kiesewetter
Enquirer Contributor
WEST CHESTER TWP. — Three Lakota students are traveling to Cleveland today to participate in the Securities and Exchange Commission's Town Meeting.
Nick Austin, Lizzie Casket and Rachel Denham will meet with SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt to discuss their participation in the Stock Market Game, created by the Securities Industry Foundation for Economic Education, an SEC affiliate.
For 10 weeks last school year, groups of sixth-grade students at Freedom Elementary School bought, sold and traded stocks at a special Internet site. They had $100,000 in fictitious seed money.
“We invested in trends,” said 12-year-old Nick, who said his group bought stock based on where their parents worked. “Whenever you lost money it brought you down, you felt, like, in debt. But when we won, it was like, yahoo!”
Nick's group finished with $104,000.
Lizzie said her group scoured newspapers daily and found luck with Kroger stock. Their strategy was to buy stock that had been doing well or was popular and likely to go up. Her group also ended up with more money than it began with, but she didn't recall how much.
“Before, it (stock) was just numbers in the newspaper,” Lizzie said. “Now it's money. It (felt) like it was real because we did it on computers.”
The students will be traveling with teacher Jenny Clute, and Ron Clink and David Craig, both with the Greater Cincinnati Center for Economic Education. The nonprofit organization provides economic education programs in many Lakota schools.
“I think it will be sort of cool to go into the federal bank and talk to him (Mr. Levitt),” said Rachel, whose group earned a 10 percent return on its investment. “I want to see what his day is like. I don't know what I want to do when I get older, but I want to see options.”
Only two groups of students — Freedom's and another group from the Cleveland area — have been invited to participate in the town meeting, which includes seminars on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, retirement issues, futures trading and treasury bonds. The students also will tour the Federal Reserve Bank and attend a portion of the town meeting before flying back to Cincinnati.
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