What Teenagers Really Learn From Stock-Market Games
Successful investors diversify broadly, avoid unnecessary risk and rarely trade. So why are kids getting rewarded for doing the opposite?
3 min
Every year, more than a million high-school students across the U.S. learn about investing through stock-picking games. If you have teenagers, they may be playing this spring.
Proponents say these games are exciting and inspire an interest in investing.
We could make drivers’ education exciting, too, by teaching kids to run red lights and crash into brick walls. I suppose you could even argue that might make the survivors better drivers.
Of course, that isn’t how we teach teenagers to drive. Yet when it comes to investing and “financial literacy,” millions of teenagers learn what it’s like to take wild risks, using play money—often amplified with more fantasy money that they borrow—to fire off a barrage of fast trades in turbulent assets.
In the long run, investors who diversify broadly, avoid unnecessary risk and rarely trade are almost certain to do well. In these stock-market competitions, teenagers who behave like that are almost certain to lose.
Emma Freeman, a senior at Lewisburg Area High School in Lewisburg, Pa., won that state’s championship when she was in a ninth-grade economics class taught by Michael Creeger. She turned $100,000 in play money into more than $550,000 in 10 weeks. “I played it as if I was day trading,” she says.
Emma would look up which stocks had just risen the most, then sell them short so she could profit from a decline. “Anything that had jumped up like crazy, when it looked like just hype, we short-sold the crap out of it,” she says.
Emma traded up to 40 times a day. “My friends told me I looked like a madwoman,” she recalls. “I would be staring at the screen and making crazy faces and stuff because it was so intense.”
Last spring, another of Mr. Creeger’s ninth-grade economics students, Zachery Engle, won the state championship. He traded 117 times in 10 weeks.
Zach used about $200,000 in margin borrowing to drive his pretend portfolio up to $583,070. “It’s nice that they let you do that,” he says. “It makes it easier to make money.”
Or lose money—which is why Warren Buffett repeatedly warns investors not to use leverage.
Mark Brookshire, founder and chief executive of Stock-Trak Inc. of Montreal, which provides the stock simulation that Emma and Zach played, says more than 500,000 students participate in grades K-12. Most play only as part of a class, not in a wider competition.
Teachers can limit the number of trades, restrict margin or prohibit short selling. Outside of state-run contests, says Mr. Brookshire, only 14% of teachers permit margin—so most portfolios aren’t leveraged. Over the typical 10-week course, the average student makes 22 trades.
“Anybody who can turn $100,000 into $200,000 in 10 weeks with what they learned in their high-school class is just lucky,” says Mr. Brookshire. “The next 10 weeks they probably won’t be so lucky. That will be the lesson, that the more you do it, the more likely you’re going to lose. I want them to lose my virtual money before they lose their own real money.”
Ryan Monoski, a former business teacher at Montgomery High School in Montgomery, Pa., has come to doubt that lesson.
In 2016 and 2017, his teams won the national championship in the Capitol Hill Challenge, a stock-picking competition run by the Sifma Foundation, a nonprofit supported by the brokerage industry. His teams also won Pennsylvania’s state championship at least a dozen times.
All these contests “motivate students to take extreme risks that will bring extreme rewards and extreme losses, and that’s not the right way to invest,” says Mr. Monoski, who now runs a stock-picking channel on YouTube.
Like teams from other schools, Mr. Monoski’s students often borrowed money to sell short. They used 50% margin to buy explosively volatile triple-leveraged exchange-traded funds, magnifying daily market moves 4.5-fold.
The Capitol Hill Challenge no longer allows any of that.
However, sessions of the Sifma Foundation’s Stock Market Game, run in all 50 states and played by 600,000 children annually, may permit selling short and borrowing on margin. Teams often own as few as five stocks at a time, not nearly enough diversification by prudent investing standards.
“It’s important to recognize that the simulation plays a small part,” says Melanie Mortimer, president of the Sifma Foundation. “The real focus is the curriculum, which is all about the fundamentals of investing and the capital markets.”
Richard Daly, the foundation’s chairman, says the organization shares concerns that the game might teach children to take too much risk. But, he says, “we don’t want to lose the greater good of all the kids we’re touching that otherwise wouldn’t be exposed” to the stock market at all.
My drivers’ ed teacher taught me to put safety first, and yours probably did, too. That’s what children learning how to invest should be rewarded for. They shouldn’t be proclaimed “winners” for taking huge risks that could encourage a lifetime of bad behaviour.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: March 25, 2022.
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Gold is outshining stocks, bonds and crypto. Here’s what’s driving the surge—and how to get in.
8 min
Give gold bugs their due. The yellow metal has been a light in the investing darkness. At a recent $3,406 per troy ounce, it’s up 30% this year, to the envy of stock, bond, and Bitcoin holders. Cash-flow purists will call this a flash in the pan, but they should look again. Over the past 20 years, SPDR Gold Shares , an exchange-traded fund, has surged 630%—85 points more than SPDR S&P 500 , which tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.
That isn’t supposed to happen. If businesses couldn’t be expected to outperform an unthinking metal over decades, shareholders would demand that they cease operations and hoard bullion instead. So, what’s going on? If this were gasoline or Nike shoes or Nvidia chips, we would look to supply versus demand. With immutable gold, nearly every ounce that has ever been found is still around somewhere, so price action is mostly about demand. That has been ravenous and broad since 2022.
That year, the U.S. and dozens of allies placed sweeping sanctions on Russia, including its largest banks, and China went on a bullion spree. Its buying has since cooled, but other central banks have stepped in. Perhaps this is unsurprising, in light of a decades-long diversification by finance ministers away from the U.S. dollar, which is down to 57% of foreign reserves from over 70% in 2000. But the recent uptick in gold stockpiling looks to JPMorgan Chase , the world’s largest bullion dealer, like a debasement trade. Investors are nervous about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his browbeating of the Federal Reserve Chairman over interest rates, and blowout U.S. deficits.
Surging Demand
It isn’t just bankers. Demand among individuals for gold bars and coins has been surging, with some dealers experiencing sporadic shortages. Gold ETFs were bucking the trend, but flows there have turned solidly positive since last summer, including recently in China. All told, there is now an estimated $4 trillion worth of gold held by central banks, and $5 trillion by private investors. Calculated against $260 trillion for all financial assets, including stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives, that works out to a global gold portfolio allocation of 3.5%, a record.
What’s next? BofA Securities says that central banks have room for much more gold buying, and that China’s insurance companies are likely to dabble, too. RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Louney says ETFs could drive demand growth from here, especially if angst reigns. “Gold is that asset of last resort…the part of the investing universe that investors really look for when they have a lot of questions elsewhere,” he says.
Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager for BlackRock , a major player in ETFs including the iShares Gold Trust , says that gold has proven itself as a store of value, and deserves a 2% to 4% weighting for most investors. “I think it’s a tough call to say, ‘Would you chase it here?’ ” he says. “There have been some pullbacks. Those might represent a good opportunity, particularly for people who don’t have any exposure.”
Daniel Major, who covers materials stocks for UBS , points out that gold miners mostly haven’t wrapped themselves in glory in recent years with their dealmaking and asset management. As a result, a major index for the group is trading 30% below pre-Covid levels relative to earnings. UBS increased its 2026 gold price target by 23%, to $3,500 per troy ounce, before gold’s latest lurch higher. Many miners are producing at a cost of $1,200 to $2,000. Major has bumped up earnings estimates across his coverage. “I think we’re gonna see further upward revisions to consensus earnings,” he says. “This is what’s attractive about the gold space right now.”
Major’s favorite gold stocks are Barrick Gold , Newmont , and Endeavour Mining . More on those in a moment. We also have thoughts on how not to buy gold—and what not to expect it to do: Don’t count on it to keep beating stocks long term, or to provide precise short-term protection from inflation spikes and stock swoons. But first, a little history, chemistry, and rules of the yellow brick road.
Flesh of the Gods
The first gold coins of reliable weight and purity featured a lion and bull stamped on the face, and were minted at the order of King Croesus of Lydia, in modern-day Turkey, around 550 B.C. But by then, gold had been used as a show of riches for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians called gold the flesh of the gods, and laid the boy King Tutankhamen to rest in a gold coffin weighing 243 pounds. The Old Testament says that under King Solomon, gold in Jerusalem was as common as stone. Allow for literary license; silicon, an element in most stones, is 28.2% of the Earth’s crust, whereas gold is 0.0000004%.
Marco Polo described palace walls in China covered with gold. Mansa Musa I of Mali in West Africa, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, is said to have splashed so much gold around Cairo on the way that he crashed the local price by 20%, and it took 12 years to recover. To Montezuma, the Aztec king whose gold lured Cortés from Spain, the metal was called, as it still is by some in Central Mexico, teocuitlatl —literally, god excrement. Golden eras, gold medals, the Golden Rule, and golden calf—so deep is the historical association between gold and wealth, excellence, and vice that it seems to have a mystical hold on humanity. In fact, it’s more a matter of chemical inevitability.
Trade and savings are easier with money. Pick one for the job from the 118 known elements. Years ago on National Public Radio, Columbia University chemist Sanat Kumar used a process of elimination. Best to avoid elements that are cumbersome gases or liquids at room temperature. Stay away from the highly reactive columns I and II on the periodic table—we can’t have lithium ducats bursting into flame. Money should be rare, unlike zinc, which pennies are made from, but not too rare, unlike iridium, used for aircraft spark plugs. It shouldn’t be poisonous like arsenic or radioactive like radium—that rules out more elements than you might think. Of the handful that are left, eliminate any that weren’t discovered until recent centuries, or whose melting points were too high for early furnaces.
That leaves silver and gold. Silver tarnishes, but rarer, noble gold holds its luster. It is malleable enough to pound into sheets so thin that light will shine through. And, despite the best efforts of Isaac Newton and other would-be alchemists, it cannot be artificially created—profitably, anyhow. Technically, there is something called nuclear transmutation. If you can free a proton from mercury’s nucleus or insert one into platinum’s, you’ll end up with a nucleus with 79 protons, and that’s gold. Scientists did just that more than 80 years ago using mercury and a particle accelerator. But what little gold they produced was radioactive. If you think you can do better, you’ll likely need a nuclear reactor to prove it, but a large gold mine is one-fifth the cost, and we have to believe the permitting is easier.
We passed over copper due to commonness, but it has become too valuable to use for pennies. The 95% copper content of a pre-1982 penny is worth about three cents today. The equivalent amount of silver goes for $3.10, and gold, more than $320. But the three trade in different units. A pound of copper is up 17% this year, at $4.72. Silver and gold are typically quoted per troy ounce, a measure of hazy origin and clear tediousness, which is 9.7% heavier than a regular ounce. A troy ounce of silver is $32.70, up 13% this year.
Some Finer Points
Confused? This won’t help: The purity of investment gold, called its fineness, is measured in either parts per thousand or on a 24-point karat scale. A karat is different from a carat, the gemstone weight, but our friends in the U.K.—who adopted troy ounces in the 15th century—often spell both words with a “c.” Gold bricks like the ones central banks swap are called Good Delivery bars, and weigh 400 troy ounces, give or take, worth more than $1.3 million. If you buy a few, lift with your legs; each weighs a little over 27 regular pounds (as opposed to troy pounds, which, it pains us to note, are 12 troy ounces, not 16).
There are many options for smaller players, like Canadian Maple Leaf coins, which are 24-karat gold; South African Krugerrands, at 22 karats, and alloyed with copper for durability; and Gold American Eagles, 22 karats, with some silver and copper. Proof coins cost extra for their high polish, artistry, and limited runs, and may or may not become collectibles. Humbler-looking bullion coins are bought for their metal value. Prefer the latter if you aren’t a coin hobbyist. Avoid infomercials and stick with high-volume dealers. Even so, markups of 2% to 4% are common. Costco Wholesale , which sells gold in single troy ounce Swiss bars, charges 2%, but often runs out, and limits purchases to two bars per member a day. Factor in the cost of storage and insurance, too.
ETFs are more economical. For example, iShares Gold Trust costs 0.25%, not counting commissions. For long-term holders, as opposed to traders, there is a smaller fund called iShares Gold Trust Micro , which costs 0.09%.
Resist fleeing stocks for gold. The surprisingly long outperformance of gold is mostly a function of its recent run-up. From 1975 through last year, gold turned $1 invested into about $16, versus $348 for U.S. stocks. That starting point has a legal basis. President Franklin Roosevelt largely outlawed private gold ownership in 1933; President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold in 1971; and President Gerald Ford made private ownership legal again at the end of 1974.
Gold has been a so-so inflation hedge over the past half-century, and at times a disappointing one. In 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at a 40-year high of over 9%, the gold price went nowhere. The problem is that high inflation can prompt a sharp increase in interest rates. “If people can clip a 5% coupon on a T-bill, often they’d prefer to do that than have either a lump of metal or an ETF that doesn’t produce cash flow,” says BlackRock’s Koesterich.
Likewise, while gold has generally offset stock declines this year, it hasn’t always done so in the heat of the moment. Recall tariff “liberation day” early this month, which sent U.S. stocks down close to 11% in three days and pulled gold down nearly 5%. “This isn’t an uncommon scenario,” says RBC’s Louney. “When investors were losing elsewhere in their portfolio, gold was sold as well to cover those losses.”
Our top tip on how gold behaves is this: It doesn’t. People do the behaving, and they are appallingly unreliable. Use bonds as a stock market hedge. If they don’t work, fall back to patience. For inflation protection, think of assets that are a better match than gold for the goods and services that you buy every week. A diversified commodities fund has precious metals but also industrial ones, along with energy and grains. Treasury inflation-protected securities are explicitly linked to the consumer price index, which measures inflation for a theoretical individual whose buying patterns differ from your own, but are close enough.
Own a house. Stick with a workaday, reliable car. Yes, cars deteriorate. But so does nearly everything on a long enough timeline. Rely mostly on stocks, which represent businesses, which wouldn’t endure if they couldn’t turn raw inputs like commodities into something more profitable. There’s even a miner, Newmont, in the S&P 500.
The Case for Mining Stocks
Speaking of which, UBS’ Major recently upgraded both Canada’s Barrick and Denver-based Newmont from Neutral to Buy. “Both very much fall into that category of having a challenging recent track record,” he says. Newmont has lost 20% over the past three years while gold has gained 76%, which Major blames on difficult acquisitions and earnings shortfalls. Barrick, down 8%, has been in a dispute with Mali since 2023, when its government instituted a new mining code that gives it a greater share of profits. In recent days, authorities have shut the company’s offices in the capital city of Bamako over alleged nonpayment of taxes.
These are the sort of headaches that Krugerrands in a safe don’t produce. But Major calls expectations “adequately reset,” free cash flow attractive, and guidance achievable. Newmont, at 13 times next year’s earnings consensus, is selling assets, and Barrick, at 10 times, has healthy production growth.
Major also likes London-based, Toronto-listed Endeavour Mining , up 40% over the past three years and trading at nine times earnings, although he says it has “higher jurisdictional risk.” It is focused on West Africa, especially Burkina Faso, which had a coup d’état in 2022. You’d think the stock would be doing worse amid such political upheaval. Then again, Burkina Faso since 1966 has had eight coups, five coup attempts, and one street ousting of a president who tried to change the constitution to remain in power. That works out to an uprising every four years, on average.
Montezuma’s scatological name for gold might have been prescient, considering the sometimes-odious consequences for small countries that find it.
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