Great job at 2025 Stock Market Challenge

  • Posted April 8, 2025
An official confers with a four-person team at the Stock Market Challenge

Need advice about the stock market? Ask the Â鶹ӰÒô High School students taking college-level advanced business math classes with Chris Austen!

Three Â鶹ӰÒô High teams placed in the top ten last Thursday at the 2025 Junior Achievement Stock Market Challenge, where some 400 aspiring financiers took part in the annual simulation of stock market trading.

Â鶹ӰÒô High teams took fourth, seventh and eighth place among the 129 teams competing from 11 area high schools. .

The annual challenge simulates the real stock market and allows students to buy and sell stocks. Teams compete in a race to accumulate the highest portfolio while learning the nuances of investing, trading, strategy, why companies issue stock, how actions in one place of the world impact the value of stock in another place, and why the stock market is an integral part of our free enterprise system.

Each team began the game with $1 million trading dollars to invest in fictitious stock. Once the trading began, every 60 seconds was a new trading day in a volatile market.

Players tracked their stock portfolio and their team’s standings on three massive screens, and teams bought and sold stocks from “traders” that instantly sent trades to the system. Teams traded for two thirty-minute periods.

Â鶹ӰÒô High fielded a total of 17 teams at the event. The fourth-place team consisted of junior Ashley Vergara, senior Nga Meh and Josh Ira Alpas, with a 35.45% return on investment.

Competing on the seventh-place team were seniors Shafin Ahmed, Kalel McCargo-Milleran and Na Zaw, with a 31.95% return on investment. And on competing on the eighth-place team were seniors Zachary Parker and Mustafa Toure, with a 30.42% return on investment.