Brand Yourself With An MBA ‘Brag-Storm’

smart kidSixth Grade Stock Club Outperforms Best Business Schools

Are you smarter than a sixth grader?

Well, you could end up poorer than one.

Forget Bloomberg terminals and Barron’s. If you want to be the “Wolf of Wall Street,” just do two things: 1) Avoid penny stocks and 2) Find out which stocks are being picked by Dave Carlson’s Math Minions.

That’s the lesson of a recent stock competition won by the McIntire Investment Institute, a student-run equity firm out of the University of Virginia. Their 18.5% return would normally make any investor envious. But the Math Minions’ 22% return put them to shame!

So who are these investment whizzes? Well, they’re 13 middle school students at the Oak Grove Lutheran School in Fargo, North Dakota. Led by Carlson, the students were learning how to manage money using online investment companies. Working through Motif Investing, students would pay a small fee to build a basket of stocks.

Turns out, the students chose steady growth stocks for the basket, including Google, Amazon, and Starbucks. To identify the best stocks, students conducted detailed research, often basing their picks on events and data. For example, Eloise Baker chose sportswear maker Under Armour, believing sales would be buoyed by Christmas and the Olympics. “That’s what I wanted for Christmas,” she told ABC. “I thought that’s what a lot of other kids wanted. I also found it to be a little bit cheaper than Nike, so I thought it was a good buy.”

The Minions’ success also stems from a conservative investment philosophy according to Carlson. Rather than looking to beat the market for a quick buck, his students stayed true to their picks. “I thought the best idea was to pick a stock that you believe in, a company that you liked, Carlson notes, “a company that you were interested in, and stay with them.”

Even Hardeep Walia, founder of Motif Investing was impressed. He also invested in the Math Minions’ basket. “It made me a lot of money,” he says.

Ah, somewhere, Warren Buffet is smiling. With that approach, maybe we’ll someday find the next Berkshire in the badlands.

Source: ABC News

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