NEWBURYPORT — Investing in bitcoin-related industries carried the Newburyport High School Investment Club all the way to first place in the high school category in the most recent round of the Securities, Industry and Financial Markets Association Foundation’s Stock Market Game.
“It just goes to show, when you have a community that rallies around supporting education, it pays off,” said team backer and Newburyport Education Foundation Executive Director Carrie O’Donnell.
O’Donnell’s nonprofit organization sponsors the high school’s club, which has been playing the market, literally and figuratively, for about three years. It is hoped that the team will be able to defend its title this spring when the next game takes place.
The Stock Market Game highlights the importance of equipping local students with practical financial skills and knowledge. Elementary, middle and high school teams competed from across the state in the fall by investing a virtual $100,000 in real-time stock markets.
The winners were announced in early January and Newburyport High School finished first in the high school category, with Boston College High School coming in second.
“We are so proud of these kids because they’ve only been doing this for about three years,” O’Donnell said. “To have so much success is even more impressive.”
Faculty adviser and physics teacher Sean McCarthy said his group came in third place in the Stock Market Game last year and its roughly 40 members were excited to find out they took first place this time around.
“There was something like 900 schools involved and beating every school in Massachusetts is just awesome,” he said. “Everybody got medals and certificates.”
The Investment Club focused on bitcoin this time, and McCarthy said his students invested in publicly traded companies tied to the industry, such as Coinbase Exchange, Nvidia, Marathon Digital Holdings and microchip manufacturer AMD.
The Investment Club speculated late last year that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was going to approve exchange-traded funds to track bitcoin and ended up appearing prophetic once the feds made the move in January.
“Some people would say it was a risk but it seemed pretty obvious to us,” McCarthy said. “Bitcoin has been exploding for 15 years and now it has priority in the market. Everything attached to it is on fire now.”
The Investment Club has also been involved in real-world trading and has invested roughly $10,000 from the NEF endowment each year.
The trading is overseen by retired investment professional Jed Petty with O’Donnell saying it is the only one of its kind in the state.
“This is something that’s very important for kids and we thought we could add a unique spin to it and that the kids could actually invest some of our own money,” O’Donnell said. “That way, the more successful they are with our endowment, the more money we can pour back into the school system.”
O’Donnell thanked the Institution for Savings for a recent $20,000 contribution to the Investment Club to put into the market, as well as bank President Michael Jones, who has invested his own time as a community mentor.
Jones said in an email he was thrilled to learn of the club’s first-place finish in the statewide competition.
“Empowering our youth with critical real-life financial knowledge and experience they will use throughout their lives is vitally important and I applaud the students, advisors and Newburyport High School for giving them this opportunity,“ he said.
McCarthy said the endowment program has been a great asset to his students.
“They meet about three times a year and present to the board, which is made up of someone from the NEF and the Institution for Savings,” he said. “You also have some local investors who just come to help out. The kids propose where they want to spend the money, they rethink it and propose again. Then, we invest it.”
NEF endowment investments, however, are often made in more conservative stocks such as Apple, McCarthy said.
“The bank doesn’t want to take big risks with bitcoin and stuff like that,” he said. “They like to be more conservative.”
Staff writer Jim Sullivan covers Newburyport for The Daily News. He can be reached via email at jsullivan@newburyportnews.com or by phone at 978-961-3145. Follow him on Twitter @ndnsully.
Staff writer Jim Sullivan covers Newburyport for The Daily News. He can be reached via email at jsullivan@newburyportnews.com or by phone at 978-961-3145. Follow him on Twitter @ndnsully.
