BROOKVILLE — For Brookville Area High School seniors Rees Taylor and Aaron Turner, the fake $100,000 to start “The Stock Market Game” was one thing, but the three-month competition was very real.
Taylor and Turner, students in Nancee Bernecky-Miles Economics class, wound up winning the state-wide competition that ended in early April. Simply put, the team that makes the most money off that start with 100 grand wins.
The duo wound up finishing with $148,000, after going as high as $161,000. The last Brookville student or team to win the state title was Chase Evans in 2020.
The key to the win? Oil.
“Once the conflict came with the Strait of Hormuz, we went super-heavy on oil at the beginning of the conflict,” Taylor said.
It paid off big-time. Taylor and Turner pointed to three companies that spurred their success — Battalion Oil, Turbo Energy S.A. and Texxon Holding Limited.
“Battalion Oil went up 250 percent at the beginning of the conflict, and we put $30,000 in on them and traded solely on momentum, meaning that if I saw like a 20 percent increase or decrease in any way like that, I was going super-heavy in any way like that,” said Taylor, who will major in business economics at Penn State Behrend starting in the fall. “I think we made money off 10 or 12 separate companies and lost money on, I think, five or six of them.”
For their win, Taylor and Turner were awarded medals, a banner, gift cards and some other small prizes.
Jumping into the stock market field is exactly what the contest tries to do with students. It’s a program run by the non-profit SIFMA Foundation and Butler County Community College, or BC3 in Brockway, sponsors the Brookville entries.
The late Bill Kutz, who taught economics at Brookville, started the program in his class and eventually Bernecky-Miles jumped in after learning the ropes for her classes.
“I usually go to a training in the fall and learn about any changes within the game and the platform we play it on,” she said. “The game has really gotten better with technology, and the students are able to see their trades and the cost a little easier. Before the upgrades, the students had to keep track on their own and wait until the next day to log in and see how they performed. There is also an app for the game that some of the students use, which allows them to trade more during the day when they can quickly log in from their phones.”
There are rules and limitations to how teams trade. Teams cannot put more than 30 percent of total money into one stock at a time and trading can only trade during the hours the market is open, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“It was pretty fun,” said Turner, who will attend Slippery Rock University in the fall, majoring in Physical Therapy. “It was a little bit thrilling. When Rees called me the one morning that it jumped up and he was like ‘Go check on-line right now’ and I checked, and I was like ‘Oh, my goodness.’”
While Taylor’s interest and background in following the stock market was much deeper, Turner played the “controller” role well.
“We were up like $20,000, and Rees was kind of spending a little more, and I was like ‘We’re going to stop doing anything,’” he said. “The first three weeks (of the contest) is why we won … We stopped buying after that.”
The stock market was of course part of the year-long class and Bernecky-Miles leaned on outside expertise to help instruct students.
“One of the chapters we cover is banking and investing,” she said. “We were learning about different types of investments in class, and Matt Reitz from Edward Jones in Brookville had come in and talked to the students about different types of investments.
“We began the game in early February, and it runs through the beginning of April. The goal of the lesson and playing the game is to learn about markets and how different events impact markets. The students will learn about different companies throughout the US and how to read stock symbols, prices and investing short term and long term. We also learn about goals of investing if students would ever choose to go that route.”
Bernecky-Miles enjoys watching how her students deal with money and investing as they learn the ins-and-outs of stock market trading.
“It is fun to watch the students succeed in making investment choices, but also watching them learn from their mistakes,” she said. “Some of the kids are big risk takers and lose a lot. Others are more cautious, even with the pretend money. All of them get a chance to make their own choices and see how the market responds to events around the world.
“Throughout the game, I keep a daily leaderboard for the classes and they get to see how the leaderboard changes,” Bernecky-Miles continued. “Even Rees and Aaron would be on top and then fall way below other leaders in their class and around the state. I get pretty competitive because I want our small school to win. Some of the kids get frustrated because they are losing a lot of money, so I have added a March Madness element to the game to get them interested. They have to choose a company, and we create brackets that match companies against each other. The students will fill out a bracket, and each week, we check the growth of the company to see who advances to the next round.
“Winners of the bracket and the winning company each get a small prize. This gives other students a chance to win a different type of game that just takes place within our classes.”
