Investment club participates in prestigious competition

Since early January, the school’s Investment Club has been participating in a prestigious high school investment competition hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

When the club participated in the competition last year, it placed in the top 10 in the world. This year, club president senior Mahir Jethanandani said its focus is on “claiming [its] title as No. 1 in the world.”

In the competition, each team starts with $100,000 in virtual money. The goal is to come up with an investment strategy and trade with various stock options to get the highest return possible in approximately three months. The final day of trading will be March 23 and finalists are announced on April 3. If the club wins, it will earn $3,500 of grant money.

To prepare for this competition, the club members read various materials on the topic of investment. For example, according to Jethanandani, they developed fundamentals by reading through the investment encyclopedia “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham. They then read about current micro- and macro-economic principles to understand “what is going on with the market and what to make of it.”

In addition, the club members have kept up with current news and discuss the market, formulating presentations and professional-grade analysis for their weekly meetings.

Even before the competition officially started, the club was preparing by having meetings and writing analysis reports. Currently, members are “actively day trading and profiting off oil plummeting,” according to Jethanandani.

Jethanandani said the most difficult part of the competition is the decision-making process, since team members often disagree.

In this year’s competition, the team hopes to beat Mohammad Islam, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York who claimed to have earned $72 million in simulated trading stocks during his lunch breaks.

“We know of him purely through news reports, but otherwise we have not met him,” Jethanandani said. “It’s not a rivalry as of yet, but we would like to challenge him for the [Wharton competition] title.”