New Hartford High School team takes second in stock market competition

Four New Hartford High School seniors have performed rewarding magic: They turned virtual money into hard cash.

It all started in Professor Andy Goodelle's personal finance class. Every fall he teaches his students about stocks, mutual funds and savings accounts, and has them participate in the Ithaca College High School Investment Contest.

This year, 10 New Hartford teams, most with four members, participated in the regional competition that, in total, involved more than 1,000 students on 317 teams from 139 high schools, according to Ithaca College.

Each team “invested” 1 million virtual dollars in the stock market and managed their portfolio from November to March. For some of the students, the competition is just a class requirement, like reading books or writing essays.

However, some get hooked, Goodelle said.

"Once they start investing, the addiction is real," he said. “There are kids who check (the stock market indicator in their classroom) every period, their free period.”

You'll even hear kids shouting questions about how your stock is doing from the parking lot.

With those students, things can get pretty competitive, even with a little trash, Goodelle said.

One of this year's teams seemed pretty lackluster at first, Goodelle said. Seniors Nick Bennett, Vinny Diodati, Nick Massoud, and Wade Ruhnke started out by investing primarily in tried-and-true blue-chip stocks like Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. The team was at around 140^th place with about six weeks left in the competition, Goodelle said.

"It just went off."

But about three months into the competition, Nick Bennett invested around $200,000 in MicroStrategy, an enterprise software company that uses artificial intelligence and a large holder of Bitcoin.

“It just skyrocketed the last two weeks before the game ended,” Goodelle said.

The team finished the competition with a 58% return on their investment, placing them in second place behind a team from Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, which saw a 63% increase on their investment.

A team from Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie placed third with a 50% return on their investment.

“I'd like to give them real money because they turned $1 million this year into $1.5 million,” Goodelle said. “That was an increase of 58% in six months. So that was something.”

Matthew Fox, director of the investment program at Ithaca College's School of Business, who ran this year's competition, said college professors hope the competition will inspire the next generation of financial leaders.

"High school students bring a unique perspective to investing in the stock market," he said. "And that was fully demonstrated during this year's competition with the top three teams more than doubling the S&P 500's 20% return over the same time period."

And this is where the magic comes in. As second place winners, the New Hartford team, after spending no real money, won $2,000, half for their school and the other half to split among the four team members. The first place team wins $3,000 and the third place team $1,000.

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