The Investment Club is one of Granite Bay’s most exciting clubs this year.
The Investment Club at Granite Bay High School is preparing to compete against 3,000 teams at the Wharton Global Youth Investment Market.
The club chooses stocks from global companies traded across the international markets in a simulated market. The investment club is one of the school’s biggest business oriented clubs focusing on stock trading and investing, although they do discuss other topics like financing.
“The competition organizers make up a scenario for all the teams to compete in,” said Hudson Barnes, the leader of the Investment Club.
The teams, which consist of seven members, get a total of $100,000 to spend. Whatever team gets the highest amount of return and meets the designated amount of money they’re looking for first wins that scenario.
“The club is broken up into different sectors and industries,” said Kevin Scifres, co-founder and member of the club.
The club focuses on specific sectors of the stock market like real estate, communications, energy and pharmaceuticals in which they often pay attention to the rise and fall of specific stocks within those sectors. The club focuses a lot of their efforts to diversify their portfolio not just with sectors but also geographically. They make sure to pick stocks from around the globe because the teams competing this year are from everywhere around the world.
“There’s a lot of research that goes into our club members time, including mine,” Barnes said.
“Every member has to present their own stock picks every week,” Scifres said.
The club practices using the same constraints given by the competition in order to prepare. In the club’s stock simulation, they are virtually given $100,000 to practice spending on stocks in order for them to achieve the highest return on investment. That money is split evenly between the group members where they must spend it wisely on their own stocks to gain that return. Every meeting each member must present their picks to help the rest of the club out on maxing out their money. The club discusses and researches the history of the pick to see if it is worth buying.
“Our investment strategy is honestly just time and logic,” Barnes said.
The club spends a lot of their time on studying the stocks they decide to invest in, which is a common strategy used in the stock market. Watching the graphs go up and down allows them to determine when to sell a specific stock or hold onto it to get as much profit as possible. This can sometimes be risky because the market can be unpredictable a lot of the time, however the club found that this works most effectively for them.
The Investment Club is going to be a club to keep an eye on this year as they prepare for their upcoming competitions.
