The family SME challenge

Welcome families of all shapes and sizes!

Thank you for your interest in the Stock Market Experience (SME). No matter what your background you can have fun and learn about investing by playing. The SME is a great game night activity. Children in grades 3 through college use the SME to experience investing first hand and learn Personal Financial Literacy (PFL) skills.

Unlike the sessions run during the school year, this session is not competitive and is structured for those with little or no investing experience. There is a sequence of short readings and videos that will take you from “What is a Stock?” to “Building a Diversified Portfolio,” as well as help you figure out how to protect and manage your newfound “wealth.”

Here’s How the Family SME Challenge Works

Each team gets virtual money in an account to start, like in Monopoly®, but in this case $100,000. Instead of going around the board to collect $200, though, you choose stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, and, if you are not faint of heart, even futures, options and currencies, then collect the gains or losses from your choices. Educational materials are available to explain the basics and show you how to find investment ideas and trade them in simple, easy to understand language.

How to Register

If you are registering for your family or group, you will register as a “teacher” and set up “student” teams. You can set up teams however you wish – each child on a separate team, paired off, or grouped together. Don’t forget to include yourself when setting up teams – if you use the “teacher account” you will not appear in the rankings. For help in registering please click HERE for the Registration Video. When you are ready, click on the “Register” button below.

Once registered “teachers” and “students” can log in by going to “https://stockmarketexperience.stocktrak.com/login?” and entering your username and password. Be sure to bookmark the login page for easier login in the future.

Remember, we usually offer these challenges to teachers for use in school, so there are questions about schools and principals and such. If you are a teacher and want to hear about our other offerings, enter the actual school and contact information. If you are not a teacher you can enter yourself as the principal and make up a name for your school. It would be helpful if you enter your actual phone and email information to help us in case you have a problem — we don’t share it, and we have nothing to market to you, except the SME, if we offer it to families next summer.

Now, let’s get started

First, let’s get oriented to the platform. When you log in (if you log in as the teacher, you will have to switch to the student view) you will land on the “dashboard.” On the right hand side below the announcements you will find the “assignments.” Let’s call them “resources,” because there is no detention if you don’t do them. They are grouped together to progress from basic to advanced topics:

  1. First Things First — Click HERE to learn about navigating the site. The video is a little dated, but it will give you a good overview of what the site has to offer and how to navigate it. Be curious — click on everything to see what is under the links! If you get lost, just go to the upper left and click on “Dashboard.”

  2. Basics: Stocks, Bonds, Funds. This group provides the basics of all the investments types available on the site.

  3. The Markets and Finding Investments. This group provides information on the markets, how to find and select stocks, etc.

  4. Trading and Building a Portfolio. This group provides information about how buy and sell and how to build a diversified portfolio.

  5. Analyzing Your Investments. No investment plan would be complete if we didn’t have a way to track how we are doing. This group of resources gives us the tools to see how we are doing.

  6. Economic Topics. This group covers significant economic topics that help us understand the major forces that affect main street as well as Wall Street.

  7. Personal Finance Topics. This group addresses topics we all need to be familiar with. Things like budgeting, managing debt, credit reports, and insurance, to name a few.

In addition to the resources listed in the assignments, articles and videos can be found in the Learn Center and Tutorial Videos drop down menus at the top of the dashboard.

Let’s just dive right in and buy about $30,000 worth of stocks. This will help us get oriented to following stocks and the market, and give us something to practice on as we learn how to find, analyze and invest in other stocks. See number 4, below, for a process for finding stocks in which to invest. Which ones are likely to bounce back from the current economic crisis (fastest), which ones may never come back?

Family Game Night

For family game night you can come up with this list together, about five or six stocks per person, and make up rules on how to distribute them among players, sort of like how properties are claimed in the short version of Monopoly®. Click HERE for ideas.

Trading Stocks

This section is a quick start plan for trading or using the resources in Assignments section described above to quickly get involved. In addition to the assignments, check out the titles in the Learn Center and Tutorial Video drop down menus at the top of the dashboard.

Click HERE for a video on how to select and trade stocks. Or, just jump in and go to the “Make a Trade” drop down list near the top of the page and select “Trade Stocks/ETFs.” If you know the company’s ticker symbol, enter it in the Symbol Box. If you don’t know it, just start typing the name of the company until a list of likely companies and their symbols pops up. For example, if you start typing in “Amazon” a list pops up with the symbol AMZN. Entering AMZN in the symbol box brings up information about Amazon, including the quote, a chart of its prices and clickable buttons provide a company profile, company news and other information about AMZN. Take a look and you may find you see Amazon in a whole new light. Let’s assume you want to purchase $5,000 of AMZN. Divide $5,000 by the current price of AMZN to determine how many shares you want to buy. At the time of this writing AMZN’s price is $2317.80, so 2 shares would cost $4,635.60, pretty close to $5,000.

Here is a guide to the resources that will get you up to speed. Stocks are the basic building blocks of much of the rest of the investments and are easy to understand and trade, so let’s start with them. The titles of videos or articles, in blue, are clickable links.

1. If you want to review the basics of stocks click the link to read, “What is a Stock?” under Investing Fundamentals, or, for the youngsters, watch the video, “Stocks Made Easy,” under Elementary and Middle School.

2. Next, read, “What is a Ticker Symbol,” and, “Getting (and understanding) stock Quotes.”

3. Watch the videos, “Trading Stocks,” and “Order Types.” Two primary order types are “market” and “limit.” A market order buys or sells your stock at the price at which it is trading when your order gets filled. A limit order allows you to specify the most you would pay or the least you would accept when buying or selling a stock.

We now know what a stock is, what its ticker symbol is, how to read a stock quote and how to place a trade. Let’s get some trading ideas, and buy some stocks!

4. Think about the lifestyles you and your family and friends live. What products and services do you all use? What brand of running shoes, skis, clothing, etc. do you use? The list is nearly limitless: food, cleaners, clothes, cars, fuel, etc. Where do you shop, Walmart, Target, a Ranch Supply, King Soopers, Amazon? What restaurants and entertainment do you use (before COVID19): McDonalds, Wendy’s, Dominoes, movies, sports (equipment or venues)? Which ones are likely to bounce back from the current economic crisis, which ones may never come back? If you don’t know it already, finding the company that owns a product, service, or store is easy. Just type into your search engine “who owns [name of product, service or store]” and you should have the answer in front of you in seconds. Some companies may be private and do not have shares for sale on the stock market. Try typing “who owns pizza hut” into your browser. You may be surprised at the answer, Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC and Taco Bell.

5. Resources for how to come up with other trading ideas can be found in a number of places. “Investment Selection and Trade Entry Video,” found at the bottom of the EConLitCo Stock Market Experience page walks you through finding and buying stocks. A collection of articles can be found in the Learn Center under Investing Basics, including, “How to Pick Stocks.” Other resources can be found among the assignments on the right side of the dashboard, or in the Learn Center or Tutorial Video drop down menus at the top of the dashboard.

Don’t overthink this at the start. What sort of business would you want to own? One that makes money! And one whose income is growing. You can make this as complicated as you wish, but for now that’s a good start.

6. Go for it! Spend about $30,000 buying stocks from your shopping list. go to the trade screen and enter your ticker symbols and place your trades. Watch what your stocks do as you go through the resources that will help you get better at picking, analyzing and trading. If one of your picks doesn’t pan out, sell it and buy something else. If one does better than expected, try to understand why, and if you think it will keep going, maybe you should buy more.

Good luck! And have fun!