So, for the past few weeks, my Language Arts class has been pretending to invest in stocks and seeing how much we gain/lose. This was inspired by Turtle from “The Westing Game” passion, which was the stock market. We learned about how to calculate the money we got, how to check our stocks and how hard being a broker is. I think this was a very good experience, so let me share it with you.

First, we needed a way to calculate our stocks. The way we ultimately ended up using was calculating it using the Google spreadsheets. We could put in a “formula” (a way to calculate things put into the spreadsheet), and every Thursday we would put in our stocks to see what we got. This was a great experience, and it was a good skill to have in the future.

We had designed logos for our “stock companies,” and names too. I drew an arrow pointing up on a graph for mine. I thought it was a good touch. We also had a notecard on which, every Thursday, we wrote the date, and how much money we had gained from our stocks. The last time I checked, I had gained $438.55, which was pretty cool!

The stocks I had invested in were Apple, because I thought we would be using a lot of electronics during the pandemic, Amazon, because, again, people would be buying a lot during the pandemic, Disney, because people would be watching movies during the pandemic, google, because people would be looking a lot of things up during the pandemic, Chipotle, because I love it, and a lot of others do, and PayPal, because on the Internet, it said that it was a growing company that would be good to invest in. As you can see, a lot of what we invested in was based on what was happening at the time and around the world. It’s good to remember what’s happening, and current events when you’re investing because it really helps. When we had first invested, we had 20,000 dollars to spend, and we had to invest in 6 companies. This was a good challenge, and over this whole project taught me a lot about how the world works. I would definitely recommend maybe just trying this, because it’s a good skill to have, and it’s fun. Thank you for reading!