A BHS stock market team won first place in this year’s Ohio Stock Market Challenge, finishing with the highest portfolio return rate of about 32% at the April 10 close of competition, outpacing the second-place team by more than double.
The Ohio Stock Market Challenge, hosted by Ashland University Centers for Economic Education and Financial Literacy, is an online stock market simulation in which students gain experience trading stocks and mutual funds in an attempt to earn the highest portfolio return rate when the competition closes.
At the start of the competition, each team receives a mock $100,000, and for three months they implement trading strategies to maximize their investment.
The winning team consists of sophomores Siddhant Makkar, Samuel Kuenzler, Antoni Hinczewski, Clarence Ouyang and Maxwell Spyke, and is one of four BHS teams that competed in the challenge this year under the leadership of math teacher John Kaminski.
Makkar, who is president of the club and a vital asset to the winning team, shared some strategies.
“We started off by identifying some small companies who we thought were headed on the right track, namely Wolfspeed [an American manufacturer of semiconductors],” he said.
The team felt Wolfspeed had very promising technology, and with a shift in leadership within the company, they believed their stock would rise.
Another strategy they used was shorting companies who they believed were at a temporary spike in value. Shorting is when a stock is sold at a high value to earn maximum profit from it in the belief that the value will soon decline and it can be bought back. While the team only did this twice, it ended up gaining them thousands in profit.
Makkar explained that their most successful strategy was trading with the Volatility index ETF.
The live ranking on the competition website shows the most recent trade made by each team. Because of this, teams sometimes follow the strategies of top-performing competitors, and Beachwood was a trend setter.
“I found out two teams stole one of the stocks that I found,” Makkar said. “That did not feel good, but it made me aware that I had to compete more.”
Club adviser John Kaminski shared that this was one issue the team learned to navigate.
“They would make the real investment and then they would buy one share of something else, and since that one share was a trade, it is what showed up as their last investment.”
Another challenge the team faced occurred when the war in Iran broke out, which caused the Volatility Index to skyrocket, and Makkar had been shorting their shares, which led to a loss of nearly $10,000.
Although he was frustrated, Makkar put it into perspective.
“The most important thing was waiting for it to pass,” he said. “I ultimately just ended up waiting until it went down to a lower price and I just accepted the loss and moved on.”
This strategizing and problem solving is what led the team to success. Beachwood hasn’t had a team win this competition since the spring of 2022, so winning meant a lot.
“I was proud of the work they put in,” he said. “The strategy they came up with was nothing that I had suggested to them, they came up with it totally on their own, so it’s good to see kids thinking independently, not just doing what some adult has them do.”
Even though Kaminski is retiring this year, Makkar hopes to see the club continue to grow.
“…We definitely want to expand to the incoming freshmen because I’ve noticed that in the past the stock market club has mostly appealed to older students, but we think that’s not very sustainable,” he said.
Kaminski also added that the stock market club isn’t just for people such as Makkar with such extensive knowledge of complex strategies, and he urges anyone to get involved to learn about investing.
“The real keys [to investing] are patience and time,” he said. “I didn’t start investing until I was in my mid twenties…if I had started investing in my teens, that additional ten years is huge when you talk about compound interest over time.”
