Why I Lost The Stock Market Game and What I Learned

The Stock Market Game was introduced to my math class in the beginning of December, before Winter Break. This game models the stock market in the real world, and allows players to practice purchasing, selling, and maintaining the proper mentality for maximal success in real situations.   

Our introduction to this unit commenced with reading books about the stock market, which covered all topics from why people invest in the stocks to how to make a sustainable investment. I

had carefully read the assigned pages, yet my peers seemed to have skimmed them. Here’s my proof: The book said that generally, there will be times when the whole economy is down, therefore, your stock will go down. However, generally after a breakdown, the economy will slowly start to spurt again, and so will your stock. This means that you should hold your stock during a time that it is low [or buy one], then sell it at a peak. Did my partners read? Based on their skimpy knowledge about stocks, presumably not. Here’s a breakdown of my two partners:

• Two boys who invest in the riskiest stocks
• Two boys who don’t listen to girls
• Two boys who don’t listen to each other
• Two boys who sold the stocks when the economy was low and bought when it was expensive
• Two boys who made us place #117 out of 150 teams participating in the region

Okay, I may just be ranting, but in my part, I did very little to alter the results of our investments. However, I am very shocked in retrospect that their names could have ever come out of my penmanship for partner suggestions.

    Our low-key results may have come from domination and poor cooperation. Domination meant somebody randomly making investments and not telling the others for agreement on a price. I remember walking through the hallways everyday between break, passing by one of my partners and listening to them confess the instability of the stocks they had purchased. I told them to hold back on the risky stocks and watch the economy as a whole before purchasing anything. I hoped that this message would somehow plant itself in their brains, but it seems to have grown in the Garden of Useless Things.

Each team started off with $100,000, and I watched our budget dip into the $89,000’s within the first day. Randomly purchasing stocks without a second guess lead me to think they felt compelled to spend every last penny. I often tried to participate, purchasing well-off stocks. However, before I opened the screen of my laptop after school, my purchases would already be sold.

This was the part of the poor cooperation aspect of our loss. I remember how study halls were filled with time on the computer, parsing over every 0.1% increase or decrease of the value of our stocks. Amazon, Apple and Facebook were three of our first investments. I had suggested Amazon because I knew it had a fairly reliable stock, some major upcoming sales down the road, and during the time, the whole economy seemed to be dipping towards the bottom of the chart. Our team agreed on purchasing 100, $540 Amazon stocks, one hundred $90 Apple stocks and another one hundred Facebook stocks.

Over the next week, the values of our stocks all seemed to drop some more. Amazon was down to $530 and Apple was around the high eighties. I told my group members an uncountable number of times not to sell the stocks and to wait for it to rise. It was not a surprise, [knowing my group member’s personalities], to find out how all 300 stocks were sold that second week. Right now, Amazon’s stock is worth $594. Apple’s is worth $108. Imagine how our final ranking would have been different If we had kept the stocks.

Most of the other companies had the same fate within our stock market game: if any amount of money was lost, immediately sell the stock, forgetting about how much was paid for those stocks. It seemed more of a competition of earning back the money we had put at risk of losing, rather than expanding our final budget over $100,000.

At first, I was really frustrated with my team mates. I tried to tell them that the economy would fluctuate a lot, meaning it will go both down and up. After a while, due to being ignored and disregarded by my teammates, I gave up on trying to win the game. I watched other groups in my class soar to number 10 out of 150. We were still number 117.

   

           From this experience, I think the greatest mistake that I have made (and learned from) is giving up after being disregarded. The boys in my group were skeptical of my knowledge. They

Take the wheel

didn’t care what I thought, and I don’t think I will ever understand their reasons. Halfway through the game, I realized I had given up on having them listen to me. In some ways, I may have given up on my dignity. However, I have learned that if people frankly doubt your ability to a level of disrespect and team failure, it is not your job to change their perspective of you, it is your job to take the wheel and steer it in the right direction: to take leadership.