Brenden Fratto, 10, finished second in South Jersey in the Stock Market Game
Brenden Fratto’s stock market motto is familiar to any Wall Street tycoon: “Buy low and sell high.”
The fifth-grade student at Eleanor Rush Intermediate School finished second in South Jersey in the SIFMA Foundation’s Stock Market Game, which allows students to virtually invest fake money based on real market prices.
Fratto, 10, was honored at an awards ceremony June 4 at Stockton University along with the other winners.
Everyone who participates in the Stock Market Game starts with $100,000 and has to choose how to invest that money. Fratto said he turned $100,000 into $121,086 by paying attention to market trends and the news cycle.
“I just bought and sold my stocks on when they were at a good time because I didn’t hold on to them super long,” he said.
“You definitely need to sell it if it starts going down a little bit, but if it’s really low from where it has been, you should probably buy it because it might start going up,” Fratto added.
The game uses actual share prices from real companies and updates daily.
“Dick’s Sporting Goods was really good,” Fratto said. “Amazon did well. At one point, Netflix was really high for me.”
Students in the Project Challenge gifted and talented class participated in the competition, teacher Rob Lyons said. He said the game made the students pay attention to what was going on in the news.
“When Donald Trump would say things, things would go up and down in the market, so the kids were watching the news,” Lyons said.
Fratto said investing wisely takes a lot of patience and time. He said he spent a long time trying to figure out what stocks to buy and when to sell.
“He was really good at selling things when they were high,” Lyons said. “He was good at knowing when to sell.”
Fratto likes math and said he may consider investing real money in the stock market when he gets older.
“I probably would because I could make a lot of money, but I could lose a lot,” he said.
