There seems to be a recent push to teach personal finance concepts in high school. That makes perfect sense to us – a little less trigonometry and a little more compound interest is probably more useful in the long run. I was in 7th grade when I was first exposed to the Stock Market Game. Basically, everyone picked one stock, and we occasionally checked to see who was doing the “best” based on price appreciation.
While I’m not sure I really learned that much from that experience of watching some random number fluctuate around, maybe it did plant some subconscious seed of interest as I ended up pursuing a career in finance. I think the Stock Market Game would be better if supplemented with a lesson on exactly what a share of ownership in a corporation means (see What Makes a Good Business?). But anyways, I digress…
Spreadsheet Inputs
- Each student in the class will have an entry, and each picks one stock
- The date that the contest is started.
- That’s pretty much it
Spreadsheet Outputs
First, we’ll add a column for what the stock price was on the start date. We’ll use the googlefinance formula, =GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute, date). Note that we’ll have to use some trickery to get the historical price because this google function returns a 2×2 array (thanks randomly searching and finding stackexchange). See below:
Then we’ll use the next column to look up the current price of each person’s stock. This is a much easier formula using the same function:
Finally, we add a column for the percentage change between today’s price and the price that we started the contest, and a column to rank everyone’s results.
Play this game with your students, and maybe you’ll inspire them to think more about the stock market and business. Check out the spreadsheet here (open and then save a copy to your folder): Classroom Stock Market Game
(Finally, cross your fingers the companies don’t pay a dividend or split during the duration of the contest or this sheet won’t work…)