On June 10, the SIFMA Foundation brought four middle-school and high-school students and their teachers to New York City for a Wall Street Experience.

The students earned their way to New York’s Financial District by winning national titles in the SIFMA Foundation’s fall and spring InvestWrite competitions. InvestWrite is a national essay competition that challenges students to analyze investment scenarios and turn out the best recommendations for long-term portfolio allocations.

Wowing the panel of judges—composed of thousands of teachers, industry professionals and Invest It Forward volunteers—with their advanced insight into the working of the capital markets and long-term investing strategies, the four were chosen from among 20,000 students who participated in InvestWrite this year.

The 2015 National InvestWrite winners in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

Their Wall Street Experience began in Times Square where the students, along with their families and teachers, saw their achievements announced on Nasdaq’s jumbo screen, six stories tall. One of the four, Ali Erani, a 9th grader from Glen Rock High School in Glen Rock, New Jersey, came to New York thinking she was supporting her close friend, Laura Yuan, fellow 9th grader from the same school and the fall 2015 national high school winner. However, when the screen announced that she was the spring 2015 national high school winner, it was Yuan who was supporting her!

The four high school and middle school students checking out their names up on Nasdaq jumbo screen in Times Square.

“It was really nice to be surprised,” Erani says. “I wasn’t expecting any of it to be like that. . . I’ve been to New York a lot, but I saw it from a new point of view because I’ve never really seen the financial side of the city.”

This year’s event was even more exciting when our national high school winner for the spring semester found out she had won on Nasdaq’s jumbo screen!

After many photos were taken of them in front of the jumbo screen, Erani and Yuan, along with the two national middle school winners, Jacob Hancher, an eighth-grader at Trinity Middle School in Washington, PA, and Sofia Tomov, a sixth-grader at Cedar Springs Homeschool in Knoxville, Tennessee, went behind the scenes at Nasdaq to watch the opening bell ceremony.

The winners with Sam Stovall and Jeffrey LaRocque.

Upstairs in Nasdaq’s boardroom, Jeffrey LaRocque, director of the Market Intelligence Desk at Nasdaq, spoke with the winners about the day-to-day realities of working in the financial industry. He reviewed the market data of the students’ favorite companies. Hancher, who asked LaRoque to look at Disney’s market data during the talk, later said, “I liked learning more about the stock market throughout the entire trip and learning what it means to invest and how you invest in the stock market.”

After speaking with LaRoque, the winners then heard from Sam Stovall, U.S. Equity Strategist of S&P Capital IQ, a McGraw Hill Financial company, and author of The Seven Rules of Wall Street who introduced himself to them as the “stock market storyteller.” He discussed his background in the industry, gave his investment outlook for the upcoming year, and showed students how various talents, even ones that do not seem to relate directly to the market, like art and writing skills, are needed on Wall Street. He also reminded the students that it is never too late to start something new.

Winners, Laura, Ali, Sofia and Jacob, along with their families and teachers, were on site to watch Nasdaq’s opening bell ceremony and then got to experience first-hand what it would feel like to ring the bell.

The winners, along with their teachers and their families, went back downtown to SIFMA’s office for lunch and each winner presented a talk about his or her essay.

“I think it’s a really huge honor to do this,” says Tomov. “I really enjoyed taking all the tours. I enjoyed visiting the New York Stock Exchange here and going to the museum. I also really enjoyed giving my talk. I’d been practicing that for a long time so I was excited to present it.”

After lunch, the group visited the Museum of American Finance to take a look at the history of the financial markets as well as relics from Wall Street’s beginnings.

Jason Blatt, one of the floor’s Designated Market Makers, posed with our winners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Finally, the day culminated with a trip to the New York Stock Exchange where the winners explored the trading floor, spoke with Jason Blat, Designated Market Makers, and watched the closing bell ceremony.

This was Yuan’s favorite part of the day. “It was really cool getting to see all of the traders,” she says, “and what the market actually looks like now that everything is electronic and digitized.”

The SIFMA Foundation thanks all those involved for making this day so memorable for our winners, especially our sponsor McGraw Hill Financial. To learn more about InvestWrite and this year’s Wall Street Experience, please visit our highlights page.

Melanie Mortimer
Executive Director
SIFMA Foundation