Three seniors

at Sandy Creek High School got a taste of the world of high finance when

they were named the regional winners in the Fall 2002 Stock Market Game

coordinated by the Georgia Council on Economic Education.

Reece Brown,

Andy Clifton and Derek Dean started with a hypothetical $100,000 on Sept.

30 and they were allowed to borrow another $100,000, if they so chose,

but it would have to be paid back with interest. Over the next 10 weeks

the three students experienced the highs and lows that come with playing

the stock market and finished with $155,408.

"We lost

a lot of money in the last week of the game," said Dean, who explained

that the team lost $30,000 due to the poor financial reports of AOL. "It

really affected the whole industry."

The students

were allowed to make one trade a day but could only buy a stock at its

closing price at the end of the day. "That was really bad,"

explained Brown. "We would watch the stock prices fluctuate and know

we would have done better if we could have made trades at any time. One

stock fluctuated by around $10,000 in a day." Another rule of the

game stated that no penny stocks were allowed and each stock had to cost

more than $5.

Though reluctant

to divulge which stocks they owned, the boys let this reporter in on their

secrets. They had shares in Navidia, a graphics card chip maker that has

a chip in the gaming system XBox, Delta, which they bought when it was

low, Anheuser Busch and Dell.

"We bought

Navidia when it was at $8.70 and it ended at $14," said Clifton.

"Though at one point it was up to $19. We also knew that Delta would

eventually go back up."

The students

did a lot of research at Yahoo Finance and found that looking at a company's

annual reports, looking at the surrounding industry and world events and

thinking about consumer needs were all helpful in determining which stocks

to buy and when to sell. They also found that sometimes nothing can prepare

you for a fall. At one point, the group was ranked in the top 15 in the

state but due to the poor final week finished 40th in the state.

Clifton and

Dean had a little experience before entering the project. They had a similar

experience in their sixth grade class and finished in first place. Their

teacher had old newspapers from different weeks and had students buy and

follow stocks. This project has the students log on to a web site and

monitor and manage their account.

Now that they

have had a taste, all three students are planning on entering the stock

market, though with considerably less of a head start. They credit their

economics teacher Mark DeCourcy with encouraging them during the game

and offering some advice. Though they entered the game with no real money

and finished the game the same way, the students did win one thing, a

free lunch at the Georgia Freight Depot in Atlanta on May 6, which also

means a day off from school.