Teen chaos investors
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 67
DEP'T OF EDUCATION
What Did High Schoolers Learn From the Trump Stock Market?
It's spring break for the New York City public schools, so Indignity's correspondent on transit and youth affairs, Mack Scocca-Ho, agreed to discuss a recent class project.
INDIGNITY: Over the past few weeks, your 12th grade Government and Economics class did a real-world-based educational activity. Can you describe it for the readers?
MACK SCOCCA-HO: As a way of getting us to understand the functioning of the stock market, the teacher set up an online simulation through MarketWatch in which we were given $100,000 in fictional currency to invest in stocks of our choosing. Trading hours were the same as those in real life, and the value of the stocks in which we invested was taken from the real values of those stocks, updated live.
You got to experience the ups and downs of the stock market as they happened, just as if you were actually participating in the equity market. And what was the market doing?
Every day from the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement onward contained a surprise. Generally said “surprise” consisted of large stock market crashes at the beginning of trading hours every day, though there were also a few rapid increases in stock price amid the decline.
How much pretend money did you start with, and what did you put it into?
I started out with $100,000. A lot of my investments were only made for short periods of time, so my portfolio was constantly changing; the only investments that I kept for the entire simulation were a traditional investment in Cal-Maine Foods and short-sales of Boeing and Nvidia.
So you and your classmates were able to short the market as it fell?
The fact that our actual Gov-Econ class, in which we did most of the stock trading, is scheduled from 10:05 to 11 a.m. made this difficult; most of the time the stock market would have already crashed for the morning by that point and be in the process of rebounding to its final value for the day, which scared lots of people off of short-selling and meant that any gains from doing so wouldn’t materialize until the next big crash, whose timing wasn’t always predictable.
I tried to short the market anyway; thanks to second-guessing my trading decisions too quickly I never made large dividends from it, but it would have worked well enough to keep me financially afloat, except that the administration made a surprise announcement of a pause in the tariffs on the last day of the simulation.
The 10 to 11 a.m. span really was when the Dow had its dead-cat bounce each day, as people got over the first burst of panic that had sent the line straight down. How did your class fit in the trading during the rest of the school day? Did some people have more slack in their schedules than others, so they could try to work the market more aggressively?
Schedules were fairly uniform. The question was really how much students would be willing to trade during their other classes, which we were told we would receive a financial penalty for doing. Being able to trade more didn’t seem to have been an overwhelming advantage.
That in itself is a helpful lesson! Stay out of the churn. But the whole project of giving kids some pretend money to pretend to invest in our stock market seems like one of those well-established learning exercises to give teens a controlled taste of the adult world, like when health class gives kids an egg or a five-pound sack of flour to carry around to simulate the constant responsibility of parenthood. Your health classes never did that one, right?
No.
We didn't either, because it was the 1980s and it would have been disrespectful to the kids who actually had babies already. But playing the stock market in April 2025 seems like doing the baby exercise only to be told there's also been an outbreak of measles. Weevils. How did you and your classmates feel about being led to the slaughter?
At least some people thought it was hilarious.
Did any of them come out ahead, or was it just a contest to see who lost the least?
Eight students came out with more money than they began; 18 lost money, including me.
What did the ones who gained put their money into?
I don’t know exactly; most of the people I talked to short-sold tech companies for most of the game and got burned badly on the final day. Some people intermittently shorted Tesla and Truth Social stock, partly as a joke.
Did your teacher feel guilty about feeding you into a market teetering on the brink of global financial crisis?
No. But he did have real investments going at the time, which he made clear to us were going about as well as ours were.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, April 13, 2025
★★★ The clouds were back to the kind of gray that meant it probably wouldn't rain. Around noon something like sun asserted itself, and the brightening brought on an elevation of mood even indoors. The pear blossoms across the street held on, dense and creamy. Spears of knotweed were bursting out, implacably, on the inside edge of the park. Blue showed here and there in the predominant gray and white. A lean brownish squirrel struck a begging pose, then tried to scramble up a low rock, slipped down, and succeeded on the second try. A drab mallard hen poked her bill at the muddy shallows and shook herself to reveal the glossy indigo speculum on her wing. On a rock out in the water, a waterthrush skittered along the wet rim left by the lapping of the windblown ripples. A blue jay dropped onto the branch of the low, budding crabapple with an audible thump. More blue appeared overhead and then light gleamed off the frets of a guitar held by someone sitting up on an outcropping. A child tottered along loaded down with palm fronds, harvested strands of willow, and other greenery harder to place.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Prague Chapter Book Of Recipes, compiled by Marie Paidar and Blanche Kammerer, published in 1922, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
ONION AND PEPPER SANDWICHES — One-fourth cup chopped green onions, one-half cup chopped green peppers. Mix with salad dressing and spread between thin slices of wheat bread. MARIE PAIDAR.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
