To get a feeling for how the stock market works, try playing this stock market game with a friend. This is a challenging activity for 13-14 year olds – “play the market” without spending a penny.
What you need:
- Financial newspaper or online resource. Here are a few online resources to pick from: London Stock Exchange, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, BBC, Guardian, The Daily Telegraph.
- A good friend!
- £10,000 each in IMAGINARY money
What to do:
- Download this worksheet. Make sure you have a copy for yourself and a copy for your friend.
- Watch the movie, Stocks and Shares, so you understand what makes a good investment when it comes to buying shares in a company.
- With your friend, make a list of 10 companies from the FTSE100 in which you might consider investing the imaginary money. When selecting companies, you should follow the advice from Tim & Moby in the Stocks and Shares movie. (Read more about the FTSE 100 here.)
- Do some reading around the 10 companies in your list and investigate how their stocks have been performing and what financial analysts predict for the future. You should be able to find all of this information in the Business sections of news websites.
- After you’ve done some reading, you should each pick 5 of the 10 stocks and divide your imaginary £10,000 among the 5. You’ll most likely need your calculator for this so you don’t go over budget.
- Use a free Internet site or a newspaper to take note of your five stocks in “Week 1” on the worksheet. (Note: Online, the numbers will constantly update during business hours. In the newspaper, they will represent the final tallies for yesterday’s trading period.)
- A week later, preferably on the same day, fill in “Week 2” on the worksheet, noting the price of each stock. Using the formula provided, you should be able to work out whether your stock has gone up or down. Do this for the following 3 weeks.
Click to start download
At the end of the 4 weeks, you should be able to see which one of you made or lost the most imaginary money on the stock market.
Did the stock that you expected to do the best perform as you expected?
October 1st, 2010 at 8:53 am
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