What is the Wharton Global High School Investment Competition?

It’s a competition that is hosted by the Wharton School of Business for high schoolers. They get into teams of four through seven to craft a personalized investment strategy for a client, which changes every year.

What made you want to participate this year?

My friends actually introduced me to the competition, and I felt really interested because I thought it’d be a good learning opportunity. But it would also be good for my college application, and I figured we already had a team formed in the first place. 

 As the team leader, what types of roles and responsibilities do you have for the competition?

The team leader is primarily responsible for communication, not so much the technical aspects like investing. I do have to receive emails from a lot of people at Wharton and also people who help us. I also communicate with upperclassmen for advice, so (my job is) really communicating all of that back to the team and also making sure that everyone is doing their part. 

What type of work went into qualifying for the semifinals?

We basically went through the experience of investing in actual stocks in the actual market kind of just to test the waters and see what would happen if we invested in this (stock) and what would happen if we invested in something else. That aspect led us to make our own strategy, which is primarily what we submitted through our final report, midterm report and our final report video. It was a strategy that we crafted through our own experience in the actual market while also adhering to our clients’ values.

What did you do to prepare for the competition? 

First, we had to select a team, and that kind of took a little bit of fine-tuning because not every team is perfect from the beginning. We also did many presentations and attended classes for finance and investing to further our knowledge about the topic. We also did our own research on our own time, looking at individual companies, looking at current events and like a lot of the background information that we needed before we actually invested.

What were the stages that led your team to the semifinals of the competition? 

The first stage was forming our team and then drafting our midterm report. The midterm was just the overall structure of our strategy so far. It was very short, so it was like an overall gist of our strategy to let the judges know for future submissions. Then the next stage was our final report, which was our whole entire strategy. It was a very long PDF full of information, and I think that was where the bulk of the work came from and the bulk of our strategy because it outlines our phases and what we did as a team. The final report included a video, which was when we basically voiced our strategy in a ten-minute presentation for a short summary pitch for the judges with visuals to explain further. Then after that, it was just extra questions we had to answer in a Zoom meeting.

As a global competition, how did you set yourself apart from the competition? 

Our team would always be sure to try to reach perfection through a lot of peer editing. We always tried our best to get the most out of our results and make it the best quality that we could, but also we set ourselves apart from competitors because our strategy wasn’t the most straightforward. Many people look at investing and they just wanna make returns for their client, such as for our client this year, Mr. Ayoola, with his infrastructure projects, but instead we looked at a broader scope of market conditions. I think that’s what set our team apart from other competitors because while they’re earning money through these high growth stocks, we ensured stability of his capital and preservation of his wealth.

Why do you think this is important for young people to be involved in these types of competitions?

It’s definitely a great opportunity for the youth because they get to learn more about investing. It’s a lot of the fundamental aspects of investing, like how to invest and what to invest in, what to do to ensure you make returns, which is really crucial for a new generation of people as they need to be financially literate, and it also helps us gain teamwork skills that we can use in professional settings as we get older, which is also very beneficial.

What is the connection between the FinXed club and the competition? 

The FinXed club is run by previous global investment competitors who actually made it into the finals’ top ten. In this club, we basically receive advice and help from our upperclassmen in regards to what’s our next step or like to help us answer any questions. Another branch of FinXed is the FinXed Corporation, which is a nonprofit that’s led primarily by Jessica Ding. They do a lot of nonprofit activities like fundraisers, bake sales, clothing drives, and they’ve also written their own book about financial literacy, so the corporation is primarily to teach people about financial literacy rather than helping the competitors in the competition. I would like to take the time to promote the FinXed club because, in the coming years, the members of Nova Investments will likely lead the club, and it’s a great opportunity to learn about finance and about investing. I recommend doing this competition even if you don’t want to do the competition or put in the time and effort. You can always join the club because we’ll probably be talking about a lot of these essential key things that you need to invest in for your life.  

What was the aspect of the competition that you most enjoyed?

What I enjoyed most about this competition was that it constantly challenged our team to learn new things, such as learning what a Monte Carlo simulation was and the aspects of building a good strategy. I think it is really valuable because all our team members learned new skills that they took away from this competition, and they are probably going to use them later in life, which is really rewarding.  

What was your favorite memory of working with the team?

My favorite memory working as a team is definitely our in-person meetings because not only did we strive to get actual work done, we also grew a lot as friends, and I think through these skills of teamwork that we’ve learned, we also became better friends in the process, which was a really fun memory.