Warwick Academy team wins challenge
A medical cannabis stock selection was one of the reasons why Warwick Academy's StockClimbers outshone 19 other teams to win $10,000 by finishing top in the KPMG Senior School Investment Challenge.
The students in the team turned $100,000 into $119,651 in six months by skilfully buying and selling stocks. The money was imaginary, but the experience was very real and the team learnt a lot about investing and how the stock markets work, according to captain Nathan Bothello.
“I never really knew what stocks were before this experience. Now, after doing this, I definitely will invest,” he said.
“There were a lot of teamwork skills that I learnt from it. It was a good experience overall.”
He said all members of the team came up with suggestions for picks to include in the virtual portfolio.
“We would look and see which [stocks] were in the news, then check on their website and then invest.”
Among the big winners for the team was Cronos Group.
Nathan said: “We were investing in medical marijuana stocks and they worked very well for us; there was one in particular called Cronos, and it got a 12 per cent return.”
There are 20 school teams competing in the challenge, and each has been given an imaginary $100,000 to invest in the stock market. The top-three teams won cash prizes for their school, to be used for educational initiatives.
The second-placed team was Mount Saint Agnes's Neritic, which won $6,000, while third-placed team was CedarBridge Academy's Money Makers21, which won $4,000.
Eleven of the teams had a portfolio profit at the end of the contest. The competition has been run for 14 years, and this year included a near record 100 students split between the 20 teams.
The results were announced by Steve Woodward, managing director, senior lead of KPMG Enterprise, in Bermuda, at a prize-giving event in City Hall.
He told The Royal Gazette: “The idea is to get kids interested in investing in capital markets and hopefully allow them to find out more about the industry, and maybe start thinking about a career.
“We also like to get them thinking about KPMG as well, because we like to attract students to us at an early age. We have a work-shadow programme for children of this age, and that leads into our internship programmes, and we also run two KPMG scholarships, one for accounting students and one for non-accounting students. The deadline for that closes at the end of May.
“We hope some of these students will consider applying for the KPMG scholarships as well, and maybe have a longer-term career with us.”

Need to
Know

2. Please respect the use of this community forum and its users.
3. Any poster that insults, threatens or verbally abuses another member, uses defamatory language, or deliberately disrupts discussions will be banned.
4. Users who violate the Terms of Service or any commenting rules will be banned.
5. Please stay on topic. "Trolling" to incite emotional responses and disrupt conversations will be deleted.
6. To understand further what is and isn't allowed and the actions we may take, please read our Terms of Service