Center for Investment & Wealth Management

Jason Zhang
"Hello, my name is Jason Zhang, and I am thrilled to have been selected as the winner of the 2022-23 Stock Market Competition. Throughout the competition, I had the opportunity to attend workshops led by industry professionals and our finance professors at Paul Merage. From these sessions, I gained valuable insights into investing, including different approaches to buying securities, such as value, growth, and momentum investing. Additionally, I learned how to build a well-diversified portfolio that delivers strong returns and how dollar-cost averaging can help individual investors compound their investments in the long run.
But the competition was not just theoretical. I also got to practice what I learned using Stock Trak, the virtual trading platform for our competition. Through the hands-on experience, I was able to consolidate my knowledge and apply my own investment strategy. I presented my strategy and learnings in a strategy paper, which I shared with the board of FLA.
Overall, participating in the SMC was a valuable experience. Not only did I learn a lot about the stock market, but I also gained valuable insights into personal finance and how to manage my money more effectively. I highly recommend that other students come and take part in the SMC to learn more about investing and how to grow their money wisely."

Toan Nguyen
"My name is Toan Nguyen, a second-year Mechanical Engineering student. I am the 2022-2023 SMC's second-place winner. For me, the stock market competition was an incredible journey of growth and learning. When I joined the competition, I was a beginner who knew little about the stock market and investing strategies. The Financial Literacy Association did a great job educating me on the basics of investing with weekly workshops hosted by guest speakers, fund managers, professors, etc. I still remember one of the first workshops was about WHY I should be investing, which turned out to be the most important lesson. I never regretted coming to the meeting with a notebook because many of the things the speakers talked about were experience-based. If you are interested in building wealth, I strongly recommend you compete in the Stock Market Competition, regardless of your experience or knowledge in investing. If you are brand new to investing, you would have a great space for improvement. As a beginner, you will learn so much just by attending workshops and trading virtually on Stock Trak. You will make mistakes, which are cost-free, but you will learn from them and save yourself a lot of time and money compared to learning on your own. If you already had experience trading, you would still be able to learn from more advanced workshops, and why not try to win that $1,000 to add to your portfolio? Anyone can win!"

Kyra Lopez
"My experience in participating in the stock market competition was truly a fun experience with a lot of knowledge gained in the process. Personally, I have great interest in the stock market and have invested a good amount of money in there, but I wanted to understand how big of a profit I would make if I would invest more money into the stock market. So being able to partake in a simulation truly allowed me to understand the change in margin by investing more money rather than putting small amounts of money.
One really important lesson I learned from the SMC workshops was the idea that investing money into the stock market is not the same as trading. I learned that trading does not maximize investment return or profits as much as investing money into the stock market. Beforehand I would do a lot of day trading but I would only make small gains. When I attended the workshop I realized the value of just simply investing in a company.
I truly believe that all students should not only just partake in the stock market competition, but I believe that all students should get involved with the Financial Literacy Association (FLA) which is the organization that hosts the event because everyone should know financial literacy and knowledge. A lot of times in our society, we prioritize general education of math, science, and other subjects over financial knowledge. And having strong financial knowledge will benefit every aspect of someone's life.
I am also a strong advocate of the saying "Money works for you, not the other way around." The best way to have money work for you is through investments, however, a lot of people are scared of investing because they don't want to lose money, too high risk, etc. But by participating in the SMC, one gets to experiment with investing without risking their own money. That is why I truly believe that everyone should participate in FLA and in SMC. "