Tupper Lake freshmen Damian McClain, second from right, and Taylor Dewyea, right, were recognized at the district’s school board meeting Monday for earning a ninth-place finish out of 896 student teams throughout upstate New York in a stock trading competition. From left are Trish Wickwire and teacher Trevor Sussey, whose class participated in the competition. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

TUPPER LAKE — The past few months have been especially volatile for the stock market. While investors might be on pins and needles, the roller coaster swings provided an opportune teaching experience for one Tupper Lake high school class.

Teacher Trevor Sussey, at the beginning of the year, asked his students what they wanted to learn about the most. One answer soared to the top of the pile — something that doesn’t usually get a lot of attention in high school curriculum — the stock market.

Sussey was pleased to see students expressing interest in it. He took their feedback and broadened it to teaching various concepts of financial literacy throughout the year — with knowledge of the benefits and potential pitfalls of stock market investing as a key pillar.

Sussey sought out teaching resources that let students “learn by doing.” He came across “The Stock Market Game” last Fall — which is just that: a gamified version of trading. It tracks the stock market in real time and allows students to execute trades during the New York Stock Exchange’s hours based on the securities’ live trading price.

Players can make as few or as many trades as they want during the competition, and their portfolio values — and competition rankings, which are based on those — are updated at the end of each day. Sussey said the daily jockeying in the rankings was something his students looked forward to seeing each day.

Teams were given $100,000 of “pretend” game money to invest as they saw fit. The game is run by the SIFMA Foundation, an educational nonprofit focused on helping educators of grades four through 12 teach their students financial knowledge.

In addition to individual stocks, students could also trade bonds and mutual funds. The game incorporates almost all of the more than 2,000 publicly-traded companies that are listed on the NYSE, giving students a wide variety of investment options to potentially incorporate into their portfolios.

The competition began on Feb. 24 and ended on May 9. The pool featured a total of 896 student teams from numerous participating high schools throughout upstate New York, according to Sussey. His students were paired in teams of two, and one of his teams, made up of Damian McClain and Taylor Dewyea, finished in the competition’s top 1%, placing ninth overall.

The two students were recognized at the TLCSD school board meeting on Monday for their exceptional performance. When the competition ended, they managed to grow their portfolio to $115,697 — a nearly 15.7% return in less than three months.

Making that figure even more impressive is that during that time, the U.S. markets were down. The S&P 500, which tracks the 500 largest U.S. companies, closed at 5,983.25 on Feb. 24 and 5,659.91 on May 9, an approximate 5.4% decrease.

During that time, the market fell even lower — with the S&P 500 tanking at 4,982.77 on April 8. That marked a whopping 16.7% fall from the competition’s first-day close. Many of the individual stocks that students were trading during the competition took even larger rises and falls.

Sussey said McClain and Dewyea did less trading than many other teams, and held a high percentage of so-called “blue chip” stocks, which are large, well-established tend to fluctuate less relative to other stocks.

“For some students, I know there was a lot of short selling,” he said. “For these guys, not as much, which is a good. It’s a good lesson to learn.”

“The Stock Market Game” includes lesson material for instructors to teach the fundamentals of investing before students dive into the actual competition. Sussey purposefully stayed hands-off when it came to the trading, even when some of his students lost money. He said that understanding a financial loss was just as important of a lesson as figuring out what does well.

“It was neat for the students to see,” he said. “If you really invested $100,000 and you lost $20,000, you would be crying.”

Sussey said it’s one thing to lecure about the risks, but that can often come across as abstract. Rather, it can be more impactful for students to experience it firsthand and learn through the emotions and psychological reactions that come with seeing money — even if it’s just game money — disappear in front of them.

“I think the team that lost more was a little more active in their trading,” he said.

For the students who lost money, Sussey hoped that learning from what went wrong in the game would help them to make more prudent financial decisions when investing with real money as adults in the future.

He said it was all the more important to expose students to this as stock trading and other forms of investment become more accessible, leading to the rise of the retail trader. It’s easy to get caught up in various “get rich quick” schemes while forgetting the very real risks that come with investing, especially with frequent short-term trading.

“I think the biggest takeaway is how important it is to research, to pay attention to the news, to listen to analysts,” he said, noting that this was something his students did leading up to and during the competition.

Sussey said what students ultimately do with their finances throughout their lives is up to them. It was his job to teach them the benefits and risks that come with those decisions, and he felt “The Stock Market Game” was an excellent tool for doing that. He said it was something he’d run again in future school years.

“The students enjoyed it,” he said. “It was a good learning opportunity and they were able to take some ownership over what they were doing because there was that element of ‘figuring it out as you go’ and learning from your mistakes, so I think there’s some good life lessons there too.”