Kearney High School students excel in Nebraska Stock Market Game

KEARNEY, Neb. — Tick by tick the New York Stock Exchange often fluctuates like today when it went up and then back down which can make the stock market stressful and difficult to navigate.

However, a group of business students at Kearney High School were able to crack the code.

Two different groups of business students at Kearney High School placed top 5 in the Nebraska Stock Market Game. An achievement these students worked tirelessly to earn.

“What I do, generally, is I go to Yahoo Finance, and I will just basically sit on that site for like 30 minutes a day at least,” Jay Shaul, a Kearney High School senior, said.

“I did it in class about every day about 15-20 minutes just looking at it every day checking, making sure everything is going well, and seeing what needed to be changed,” Colin Kriger, a Kearney High School junior, said.

The Stock Market Game is an online simulation of the global capital markets. Through 15 weeks of active involvement, the students look to grow their $100,000 virtual cash account into a top-performing portfolio.

“It follows real time New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, so they just get to try out different types of investments. See what works. See what doesn’t work over about a three-month period,” Kaylei Becker, a Kearney High School business teacher, said.

Students say this hands-on learning curriculum helped them have a deeper understanding of the real world and finances and economics.

“It helped teach me that there’s a lot more to it than people think that economics is just the stock market, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s the understanding of human behavior, and scarcity, and everything that Ms. Becker taught us throughout the term,” Kriger said.

“I learned that with the stock market you can be very lucky, and you can also be very unlucky, and I also learned that like it’s easy to be either,” Shaul said.

The Stock Market Game also helps students build their skills in subjects like math, English, Language Arts, economics, and social studies.

Students pair into groups of 2-5 people. These students say there was a lot of teamwork involved.

“Everybody has an opinion and there’s going to be yeses and there’s going to be nos. Probably more nos than yeses, but just working together,” Kameron Ford, a Kearney High School senior, said.

“If you asked me like two years ago, if I could do something as a team or as a solo rider, I’d be 100% solo, but the older I get it’s more like ‘I would love to do a teamwork exercise,” Shaul said.

There are three divisions of the competition for elementary students in fourth and fifth grade.

The Middle school division for 6-8th grade students and the high school division.

The top three teams in the Stock Market game from each division will be invited to the Nebraska Council of Economic Education “Banquet of Champions” to recognize their hard work.