Once again, a team of Albany High School stock market wizards clinched first place at the annual Junior Achievement Stock Market Challenge.
The team of senior Boubacar Barrie, junior Joseph Campbell, senior Jesus Castillo and senior Sheila Cates beat out aspiring financiers on 53 teams – nine others from Albany High and the rest from five area schools – at the 2022 event held Tuesday at the University at Albany.
The winners all are students in teacher Christopher Austen’s college-level advanced business math class at Albany High.
Each year, Junior Achievement of Northeastern New York and SEFCU sponsor a Stock Market Challenge for hundreds of high school students throughout the region. The challenge simulates the real stock market and allows students to buy and sell stocks.
Teams competed Tuesday in a race to accumulate the highest portfolio while learning the nuances of investing, trading, strategy, why companies issue stock, how actions in one place of the world impact the value of stock in another place, and why the stock market is an integral part of our free enterprise system.
Each team began the game with $1 million trading dollars to invest in fictitious stocks, over a sped-up two-month time period, in a volatile market. Once trading began, every 90 seconds was a new trading day; the pace quickened halfway through and every 60 seconds was a new trading day.
Players tracked their stock portfolio and their team’s standings on three massive screens, and teams bought and sold stocks from “traders” that instantly sent trades to the system to be viewed on massive screens for all participants to see.
Albany High has an outstanding track record at the Stock Market Challenge, which started in 2018. The Falcons won in 2018, took third in 2019, took first in 2021 and are first again this year (there was no challenge in 2020).
Stay tuned to learned how Albany High’s other nine teams fared in the competition. The results were not immediately available.
