Investment Club Makes Gains...and Friends

The Middle and Upper School Investment Club was featured in the Finance section of the January 16-22 issue of Crain`s. The young club has made big strides toward becoming a popular and practical way to teach students about money, saving and wise financial choices. Investment club coaches students on fundamentals of financial planning By Kimberly Bonvissuto clbfreelancer@crain.com As an astute fourth-grader, Ryan Schikowski joined an investment club at Hawken School to learn about investing in the stock market. After all, said the now seventh grader, he didn`t want to be sitting around when he was 30 years old wondering what to do with his money. Three years ago, Hawken students Paul and Drew Macklis of Bentleyville were debating about stocks and discussing personal financial issues when they thought, why not share this information with their friends? They begged their mother, Carol Clark Macklis, a certified financial adviser with Cleveland`s BioEnterprise Corp. and the person behind their financial knowledge, to create a club for other students to learn about stocks, investing and saving. The proposal was met with enthusiasm from the Hawken School administration and Mrs. Macklis started a fourth -grade club with Drew`s class. Today, 16 seventh-graders and 11 ninth graders participate in clubs at the middle school and upper school. \"Throughout the country many Americans are way over their head in debt, especially credit card debt,\" Mrs. Macklis said. \"A lot of people don`t realize how important it is to begin saving at a young age. You can never go back and recapture a lost opportunity to have investment returns. I really wanted to try to reach them when they were young, the way you try to reach them about drugs and smoking.\" Being financially savvy is a life skill, Mrs. Macklis said. She gave the students examples of how much money they could have today-and what they could spend those dollars on-if they had invested it five years ago. The students were riveted, she said. Playing the game After providing fundamental lessons on personal finance, investment and economics, she enrolled the clubs in the online Stock Market Game sponsored by the Securities Industry Association. Teams are given a fictional $100,000 to invest over a 10-week time frame and compete against each other to earn ` the highest returns. \"A wonderful aspect of the game is it is a real time trading game. All purchases and sales are done in real time with real stocks,\" Mrs. Macklis said. Over the past four semesters, Hawken teams have placed in the top three winning positions. The seventh-grade team recently placed second in the competition, increasing their starting cash position to $120,753, representing a return that was 18% above the performance of the Standard & Poor`s 500 Growth Index over the same time period. This team also placed fifth overall among all participants, including all adult and college participants. With their $200 winnings, the team is donating 50% to the Hawken School library. When the club isn`t actively involved in the Stock Market Game, Mrs. Macklis is lining up guest lecturers to approach financial issues from different angles. She said it`s not uncommon for parents to sit in on the lectures and ask their children for advice on picking stocks; Seventh-grader David Parker said he joined the club after finding out that buying a stock meant buying a part of a company and making money off of it. Now that he`s been in the club for three years, he said his parents often hit him up for stock tips. He`s also invested some of his own savings into the market and is planning to buy his first car when he`s old enough. \"I want a car that drives and doesn`t break,\" he said. Savvy teens offer advice Seventh-grader Josh Bass said his family takes turns choosing a stock every three months to in