FARGO, N.D. (AP) — A class of sixth-graders from North
Dakota has schooled some of the best college business students in the
country on the stock market.
It started as a competition between
the regular and advanced math classes at Fargo’s Oak Grove Lutheran
School, where Dave Carlson was teaching his students about handling
money through two online investment companies. Unbeknownst to the middle
school investors, one of the companies was at that time holding a
university challenge that offered a $5,000 first prize to the investment
club with the most profitable basket of stocks.
While
Virginia-based McIntire Investment Institute won that contest with an
18.5 percent return, Carlson’s regular math class yielded a nearly 22
percent gain and trounced all the university clubs on a
return-since-creation basis.
Move over Berkeley, Cornell, Columbia, NYU and USC. You’ve been beaten by Carlson’s Math Minions.
"When
we found out we had beat the colleges, everybody was really loud and
yelling," said Jacob Lang, one of 13 students in the Oak Grove class.
"It was really cool."
Carlson’s classes started the project using
an app through BreadVault, a Fargo company that makes online money
management tools designed for families with children. BreadVault owner
Ross Almlie referred them to Motif Investing, a San Mateo, Calif.-based
company that enables customers to buy baskets of stocks that are named
motifs.
The class results so impressed Motif Investing founder
Hardeep Walia that he made his first trip to North Dakota this month to
visit the students.
"You guys crushed it," he told the young
investors who mopped up with stocks like Netflix, Starbucks, Under
Armour, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Priceline.com.
Motif charges a
flat fee of $9.95 to buy collections of up to 30 stocks based on an
investment idea. Walia’s wife, for instance, has a motif called "No
Glass Ceilings," which is based on stocks of companies led by female
executives. Other examples, apropos to North Dakota, are "Rising Food
Prices," featuring products from the farm to the supermarket, and "Frack
Attack," focusing on the oil and gas industry.
If someone else buys a customer’s motif, the customer makes a royalty. Walia himself snatched up the Oak
Grove motif.
"It made me a lot of money," he told the class.
The
motif assembled by Carlson’s Math Minions centered on companies the
students knew about with good track records. They did research and in
most cases made solid investment decisions. Eloise Baker said she
decided to buy Under Armour, which makes sportswear and athletic gear,
based mainly on the fact that Christmas and the Olympics were around the
corner. Sure enough, the stock shot up. The company just last week
approved a 2-for-1 split.
"That’s what I wanted for Christmas. I
thought that’s what a lot of other kids wanted," she said of Under
Armour clothing. "I also found it to be a little bit cheaper than Nike,
so I thought it was a good buy."
While each student was allowed to
make one stock switch, Carlson encouraged them to be patient with their
selections. He believed the class came out ahead of the university
challenge in part because the college students were looking for a quick
buck.
"I thought the best idea was to pick a stock that you
believe in, a company that you liked, a company that you were interested
in, and stay with them," Carlson said.
Walia said he was "blown
away" with the level of thinking by the Oak Grove investors. Not all of
the students were taking credit, however. Ben Swenson, who invested in
Stratus Properties Inc., had another explanation for the high returns.
"I think it was sheer luck," he said.
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