The Stock Market Kids

Editor's note: While school may be out for the summer, Patch is still profiling local kids who've earned the title "Whiz Kids." It's part of Minnetonka Patch's summer school series.

Move over New York Stock Exchange and make way for a new trading floor – the playground.

Instead of trading important lunchroom commodities such as “my twinkie for your pudding cup,” 4th graders at involved in The Stock Market Game (SMG) are entrusted with $100,000 of virtual money to invest in the stock market.

High Potential Teacher, Diane Rundquist, uses SMG as a math enrichment tool for 31 students identified by their teachers as “strong thinkers.” Rundquist said the program is effective because of it's “real-world context.”

“Anytime we can connect learning to what's really going on out there, and it's not this false little box activity where we're filling in the blanks - that makes it powerful,” she said.

Using websites like Yahoo Finance, the kids researched stocks and read advice from analysts. Looking for company ideas to invest in, they also read newspapers and kept up with local and global news to see what impact events might have on their stock choices.

Team representatives Micah, Dylan, McKayla, Rebecca, Mene and Sophia shared with Patch some basics on how to be a successful investor.

“You should diversify your portfolio, like, don't put all your eggs in one basket–don't put all your money in one stock,” said Dylan.

Rebecca agreed, “If you only invested in companies that made medicine, and then they, like, find something bad about it, and it completely goes down – you'll be losing a lot of money.”

Sophia explained that if a stock is good you need to keep a close watch.

“If it's good, then you need to watch it more because the lines on the bar graph, they can go up or down - sometimes it moves really fast,” she said.

Describing what makes a stock desirable, Rebecca said, “You have to think about whether it's something people use a lot.”

Dylan piped in, “Like for Apple, they just came out with the new iPad 2 , and they have iPad and the iPods – those are really popular.”

According to Rundquist the critical thinking involved in making decisions to buy or sell stock is “huge.”

“It's that experience of saying 'what does the real world tell me is going to happen, what is the rule of chance in this?'” she said. “Think of how complicated the intellectual process is – just having to look at things from so many different angles.”

Sophia explained the global angle.

“The tsunami in Japan would affect a lot of things made in Japan,” she said “Say there is a really popular thing that a lot of companies use to make their product and something bad happened to that thing. Well, they would be going down because they didn't have enough in order to make the products that they make.”

Some students described seeing money in a new light after experiencing the ups and downs of SMG.

“Money can either really grow or really go down. You have a lot, and then you have half that,” explained Micah.

Said Dylan, “Sometimes I see a one dollar bill as five dollars or a five dollar bill as one dollar.”

“It kind of makes you think that money is more valuable,” described Mykayla. “When you look at something in the store that is just a dollar, and it's a piece of plastic, it makes you think that you can get it and the dollar is nothing, but with the stock market, it seems like the dollar is more.”

Rundquist may see the intellectual merits of SMG, but Mene has got it figured out.

 “It's fun investing,” she said.