NEBRASKA CITY – Nebraska City students are coming off a third place finish in Nebraska competition for the Stock Market Game and competing nationally as part of the Capitol Hill Challenge sponsored by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Wyatt Roberts: “Basically you start out with $100,000 and then you invest in a bunch of different businesses, whatever you want, and the goal is to get as much money in the allotted time as possible. I love strategy, love trying to penny pinch, anything I can to win, so I always have fun in those style of games.”

Jason McNeely of the Nebraska City Education Academy has been leading students in the Stock Market Game for over 20 years.

 

 McNeely: “If I had my way every kid would be involved in something like a personal finance class or just this experience. Because these kids, that are educators, their first question is why do I need to know this.

Who doesn’t need to know this?”

 

Over 200 teams competed this winter across the state, including 10 teams from Nebraska City. Each of the top two Nebraska City teams earned scholarships sponsored by BluePrint Financial Planning.

Kiel VanderVeen: “Establishing good financial habits at a young age is absolutely crucial. Nebraska City has a relatively high poverty rate as highlighted by the Edge organization and, if we can start that conversation early with students, it definitely ripples through to parents, to the rest of the family. We want them to start out on a good foot.”

McNeely and high school business teacher Matt Thompson emphasize that the 10-week game is short-term investing and encourage students to learn research skills such as  how to determine which stocks are at a 52-week low.

McNeely: “Most kids bought stocks and even though I would tell them in their real life it’s probably going to be mutual funds, but here they were buying stocks.

"So we went through this process. We’re in the middle of this pandemic, so it started like in early October, what might happen in the next 10 weeks. Some of them bet that the pandemic would start … good things would start happening and other said I don’t think it’s going to. The kids that bet on travel, they thought it’s going to come back quick. They didn’t do too well.”

 

Roberts and his teammate Alyssa bet on the vaccine and reaped the benefits when their company got federal approval for the vaccine first.

Roberts: “We started out early with a huge increase because we invested in one of the vaccine companies and that gave us over 200 percent back on our investment.”

He said the big push from the vaccine helped them triple their money, but there was still a lot of patience holding onto stocks that offered gradual gains.