D135 Students Turn Fake Cash into Big Wins in Stock Market Game

ORLAND PARK — Usually, 5th-grade students spend math class solving problems in a book or on paper. But two local students, Nora and Lucy, spent their time trading stocks like professionals.

The two girls took part in a special project called the Stock Market Game during math this school year. Their teacher, Mr. Minarovic, gave them a virtual bank account with $100,000 in "fake" money. The goal was to invest it in real companies to see if they could make a profit.

Learning the Ropes

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At first, Nora and Lucy didn’t know much about how the stock market worked. To get ready, they did a lot of research. They even read a book about "short selling," which is a way people trade stocks.

The girls worked as a team. Usually, one of them would find a company they liked. Then, the other would check to see if that company’s stock was going up or down. Instead of buying everything at once, they bought small amounts of shares in companies they already knew, like Apple, Disney, and Tootsie Roll.

A Smart Strategy

While the game was happening, the stock market changed a lot. Sometimes the prices would go down, which would usually result in people getting scared and selling their stocks, but Nora and Lucy stayed calm.

"We didn't sell anything," Lucy said. "We just kept it all in. Even when it went down, we knew it would go back up eventually."

This plan is called "buying and holding." It takes a lot of patience, and it really paid off for them!

Top of the Class

By the time the game ended, Nora and Lucy had made over $13,000 in profit. Because they did so well, they finished in 2nd place out of 126 teams. They beat thousands of other students, grade level through high school, across the state of Illinois

Nora said it was fun to show that kids can be just as smart with money as adults. "I think people think kids don't really know what they’re doing, but we showed that we can actually understand this stuff," she said.

Both girls say they want to keep watching the stock market even though the project is over. They learned that math isn't just about numbers on a page—it's something that happens in the real world every day.