This year in Ms. Brookhart’s accounting classes, students were tasked with participating in the Maryland Stock Market Game. This is an interactive game where teams of students are given $100,000 in virtual money that they can then use to invest in common stocks that are listed on the New York and American Stock Exchanges. Students can trade, short, and sell real-time stocks within their accounts, allowing them to experiment with different stocks, companies, and trends. Many states allow schools to participate in the competition with schools in their region and the winners from each region are given prizes

In April, one of the groups from Mt. Hebron consisting of Bryce Kinberg, Cole Harrsen, Brian Jun, and Mahmoud Abdel-Halim finished first out of 253 groups in the Maryland region. The group finished with a profit of $32,430 at the end of the 10-week competition.

Ms. Brookhart was pleased to see her students excel during the game as she said, “It was very exciting having a team win the Stock Market Game, but also having so many other teams do really well. It was a complete turn around from last year.”

The group will have a virtual awards ceremony where they will receive a certificate and a banner with their names on it that will be hung up in the school. With this accomplishment, Ms. Brookhart added, “I really hope students understand the great expectations that have now been set and can be achieved.”

Unlike previous years, the Stock Market Game groups this year were faced with an unprecedented task of trying to trade stocks during a global pandemic. The coronavirus had a huge impact on economies since many businesses and companies were closing worldwide and people were being laid off. This resulted in a global stock market crash and one of the worst days of the U.S stock market since the 1987 stock market crash.

One of the members of the group, junior Cole Harrsen said, “It was hard dealing with the coronavirus because it affected almost every stock negatively, so most of them ended up losing value.”

Although many of their stocks were plummeting, there were still some trending upwards. “Our best stock was Shopify, which is a company not many people have heard of because it is based out of Canada,” said Harrsen.

Shopify is an e-commerce company that allows customers to build their own websites online. When the company released its quarterly earnings back in February, the stock had a huge spike that the group took advantage of as it only trended upwards from the beginning of the year.

Although the group eventually ended up winning, there were still things that could be improved on in the future. “I wish that our group could have held onto some stocks longer because we sold most of them when they had a lower stock value which resulted in us losing money,” said Harrsen. Despite the challenges of the global economy, Mt. Hebron’s team was able to come out on top.