As I reflect back on my project, I realized some challenges along my journey. In educating high school students about financial literacy, as an educator, I always remind myself that people do not have the same background. Therefore, the activities should include everyone regardless of their experiences. Due to limited time, I did not successfully educate everyone on some basics which were crucial for some people with little background experience. Moreover, teaching personal finance is not like teaching a class but it is to introduce a life-style to a person which requires time and dedication. I could have started the learning process earlier in order to be more effective.
The simplest yet hardest success was getting high school students to be interested in personal finance. It is almost as important, if not more, to know how to keep money as to earn money. Not everyone realizes that fact. By starting a club, more students are interested in the field, and I hope that this success will grow exponentially. Other successes include making (virtual) profit from stock simulator, did some research on companies in order to be a better consumer, etc. Lastly, my MIT Launch team was selected to participate a Demo Day at MIT Sloan School of Management. It was a great experience to learn about entrepreneurship with professionals and other young entrepreneurs. My future goal after this year is to continue the investment club and potentially launch a start-up.
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1) http://kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
This website is a part of Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania. The website hosts the high school investment competition. It also provides various resources to build skills in business and personal finance education. 2) https://www.incharge.org This website provides lesson plans for personal finance education. It categorizes the topics by ages which is helpful in constructing lesson plans specifically for teens. 3) http://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com This website is a stock simulator. It allows users to create a league and compete within the group. When I created the league, I was able to monitor the activity of the members. 4) https://mitlaunch.com This website is an official website for MIT Launch club program. However, it also provides useful resources for building our business. Even though Principal Play Day and April long weekend were nice, they took away two meetings for the investment club. As a result, we did not do much as a group this month rather than discussing the plan for the next few months. We agreed on doing stock simulator individually and learning about students related investments (loans, banking services, insurance, etc.). I created a league on wallstreetsurvivor.com for the members to join and play with the stock simulator. Moreover, I sent out a quick survey asking for feedback about the club. Everyone agreed that the club was helpful and intriguing. However, we should improve on learning more specific ideas since we mostly explored the general concept. The feedback will be used to improve the plan for next year.
I have been participating in MIT Launch club program with the Entrepernuership club on campus. The program provides helpful resources about entrepreneurship. The participants were assigned to create a business model under the theme of "education." We realized the harm that comes with the presence of fake news and were determined to solve the problem. We eventually did a business model for Hatch, an educational news website designed to present the selection bias in the news and encourage students to reflect on and discuss media bias. The deadline for final pitch was in March. Despite the late night work hours, I think that it was a great learning experience.
The trading session on the stock simulator ended in early March. All teams were expected to finalize their investments, though, the data could be accessed as long as the account was active. Attached below is our final dashboard. As we discussed earlier, our main focus was cyber security, banking, and energy sector. Therefore, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Alphabet Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Facebook Inc. constituted almost 70% of our investments. However, we would like to decrease the risk by diversifying our portfolio, hence other companies and sectors. After the trading session, the team crafted an investment plan that explained our portfolio and our process of arriving at that conclusion. For a very brief example, we mentioned that time horizon, risk behavior, trends of the market and how they would benefit through our investment plan. I would like to thank for the time and effort from the team members and our advisor, Ms. Arbour.
For the next two meetings, the club did something a little bit more fun -industry analysis! Since buying stocks actually means that we are buying a percentage of ownership in the company, we better make sure we know the company well enough! For the first meeting, we went over some important tools for industry analysis: SWOT analysis and Porter’s five forces. SWOT are acronyms for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The five forces are threats of new competition, threats of substitute products, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers, and strength of competition. We applied the knowledge to some examples together in order to obtain a better understanding of the topic. And here comes the fun part, each member will get to choose a company or two of their interests, conduct an analysis, and share it with the group. The analyses will be used to in our stock-picking process in the future. Here is an example of SWOT analysis from Prim B. After evaluating our investment behaviors, for the first two meetings of February we shifted our focus to a specific type of speculation: stock market. Speculation is a transaction in which you are uncertain about the profits. We started off by talking about risk and how it played a significant role in investing. Being able to identify risk would be helpful in crafting an effective investment plan. However, I would like to emphasize that investment in this case was not always stock market, real estate, mutual funds, etc. Instead, going to college or buying a new car were considered investments too. I shared a quote I found with the group:
“You have to realize that sometimes there will be inefficiencies or you will make the wrong move, but if you constantly work at improving yourself, you can be successful.”-Patrick Goldin I led the group to discuss about what could affect the stock prices, and the group came up with consumer tastes, economic conditions, the government, and media which was a really good start! They were asked to identify some that were occurring at the time. The group brought up the new presidency and cyber security trend. In addition, the next meeting was dedicated to share some news articles that each member found related to the current trends and the stock market. This information will be used in industry analysis later on. My signature project focuses on educating high school students about personal finance and investment through our investment club and stock simulator. Thus, for this month, I decided to interview my club adviser, Ms.Arbour.
A month working with new investors has been fun and challenging. Being able to engage with investors who have different experiences is eye-opening! The purpose of the club is to educate young investors about personal finance, so we concluded that we start from the first step, evaluating ourselves. I have gathered some resources over the break to be the guide for our club meeting plans. The first meeting of the month was about time horizon, risk behavior, and basically the things to consider before creating a portfolio. Attached is the summary that I sent to the members and listed below is the topics we discussed during the meeting.
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AuthorMy name is Nat from Emma Willard School. I am exploring and learning about the stock market! Archives
May 2017
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