ASHLAND — Seventh-grade students at St. Edward School have a head start on the stock market.
Several recently competed in the Ohio Stock Market Challenge, a 10-week investment competition organized by the Ashland University Centers for Economic Education and Financial Literacy. Students in grades four through 12 are eligible to participate.
Kevin Valentine, the seventh grade teacher at St. Edward, said students at the school have participated in the challenge for the past two decades.
Valentine said teams, typically between one to five students per team, get a set amount of money — in this case $100,000 — to invest and spend the following 10 weeks trying to earn on their investments. They have an additional $100,000 available to borrow if desired.
“I just basically teach them the basics,” Valentine said near the end of April. “I pretty much let them do their own thing.”
The spring 2026 Ohio Stock Market Challenge began on Feb. 2 and concluded April 10. A pair of middle school teams from St. Edward ranked among the state’s best by the end of the 10-week competition.
The team of Kensley Hoffman and Owen Schneeg placed first out of 105 middle school teams. They finished with a 9.89 percent gain on their initial $100,000 balance.
Not far behind their classmates, the team of Cora Donatinni and Michael Bittner finished in third.
Hoffman and Schneeg were awarded $150 for their first-place finish. Donatinni and Bittner received $50 for third place. Between middle and high school teams combined, there were 240 teams competing this spring.
“I didn’t pick any of their stocks and I didn’t tell them when to sell any of them. I don’t do that. They did that themselves,” Valentine said.
Students spent a portion of nearly every day working on the challenge throughout its 10 week course, sometimes even continuing to research and monitor the market at home, the teacher said.
The challenge equips students with basic knowledge of the stock market and how they can invest their own money someday or have someone else invest their future earnings for them, Valentine said.
Stocks are a ‘gamble,’ says Bittner
All four seventh graders said it was the first time they had been introduced to the stock market.
Bittner said he and Donatinni tried to keep their investments at or below $200 when selecting stocks to purchase. The pair wanted to avoid overspending and also wouldn’t purchase anything unless they both approved of the transaction.
“We trust our gut and if one of our guts was off we wouldn’t do it,” Donatinni said.
The team’s key stock was Coca-Cola Consolidated, Bittner said.
“It was all over the place near the end, so we decided to sell that one at the very end and buy as many more shares of it as we could. I’m pretty sure that’s what got us into third place,” he said.
Coca-Cola was also key in Schneeg and Hoffman’s first-place effort, as well as Shopify, Schneeg said.
Students studied charts and graphs to decide what investments they want to make. Schneeg said he even paid attention to what brands were being promoted by celebrities.
“With stocks, it’s a lot of a gamble,” Bittner said.
More takeaways from challenge
The group of students said the competition expanded their knowledge of money, as well as how to begin profiting on investments.
Schneeg said he learned to not give up. But the group also learned about the enormity of risk involved with stocks and investing.
“It’s great to invest and understand it, but you don’t invest unless you really know what you’re doing,” Valentine said. “As they saw, they lost money. It wasn’t real money, but they could see how easy you could lose your real money if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Donatinni said the project has opened her mind to the possibility of one day pursuing a career in finance or economics.
The students said they enjoyed the hands-on element of the competition, as well as the freedom to make their own decisions with little oversight.
“It was fun. It was definitely stressful,” Hoffman said.
Valentine said he’d like to thank Linda Spencer and Ashland University for their continued support of the program.
