New York Post
April 18th 2000. pg. 25

Kids feel pain in cyber trading game by Jessica Graham Sade McFadden was devastated when the market took a nose dive last week-although the 601 "shares" of Microsoft in the 13-year old's "portfolio" were just part of a game to teach about the world of finance.

"I hate Microsoft," the slender seventh-grader said in her classroom at MS 61 in Crown Heights. "It just keeps going down. I don't know what to do to get my percentages back up." Her team plunged from 2nd to 16th in the city among the 126 middle-school groups playing the Stock Market Game, a contest administered by the National Council of Economic Education.

"I think I 'll stick with the old-fashioned technology stocks," she said. "Technology stocks are just to risky," Each of the school's seven teams started out with $100,000 of fake cyber-money for a portfolio. Many of the students started out investing in companies with products that they were familiar with, like Tommy Hilfiger and McDonald's. But they quickly discovered that their stocks didn't sky-rocket when they bought jeans jackets or Big Macs. Then like Sade, they wised up and converted their portfolios to technology stocks, only to be rocked by the market's dip last week.

Seventh-graders Akel Williams and Randolph Austin both 13-year-old experts, thought they'd be in the clear, since they didn't own any Microsoft stocks. "It didn't matter," the all-business Williams said on Friday. "We got trounced. Sometimes I wish we were playing with real money. But this I was glad it was fake." With three weeks left to go in the competition, their adviser, Rhonda Morman, is pushing her students to "Buy! Buy! Buy!" "You guys are too conservative," Morman said several times last week, while the kids tried to salvage their portfolios during time spent in class and after school. "If your money isn't invested, it's not doing anything for you." But Morman said she's proud of her "babies," who have held their own this year, despite stiff competition from city leader Dalton, the exclusive private school on the Upper East Side.

"There, you've got children whose parents have stocks, and whose families are familiar with the market," Morman said. "These are inner-city kids. They're doing this themselves. And they're doing a great job.

Taken from New York Post April 18th 2000. pg. 25