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Teenage traders turn a profit for charity

Tuesday 19 May 2015

WEB TDDI present cheque to winners Y8 investment challenge

Student traders from The Grammar School at Leeds (GSAL) have won an online investment challenge and selected Teenage Cancer Trust as their beneficiary for a donation from the challenge organisers.

TD Direct Investing worked with GSAL’s department of economic studies to develop a financial literacy challenge to provide real-time investing experience and direct learning for year 8 students. Participants in the educational trading game used virtual cash to trade on the markets (£100,000 in technology, banking and retail sectors over a period of eight weeks).

The winning team of William Hardy, Jeremiah Paredes, Eric Jiang and Albert Wang amassed a portfolio worth £125,555, representing a massive 26% return. Their investments outperformed those of all other participants, including GSAL’s head of economic studies Rob Stevenson.

Although the investment pot was virtual there was real cash at stake – TD Direct Investing donated £500 to Teenage Cancer Trust, the charity chosen by the winning team.

Year 8 student Albert Wang said: “It was all new to us and we learned a lot by discovering that trading can be a fun, strategy based activity. We started clueless, but by the second game we used more strategy, varying it for each round as we got more experience. We’re really pleased to have won and be able to donate the winnings to Teenage Cancer Trust.”

The game was devised through a collaboration between Rob Stevenson and the TD team of Alison Ritchie, CSR manager, Marc Mills, frontend web developer and Moira Robinson, executive assistant to the head of TD Direct Investing.

Alison Ritchie said: “Improving financial literacy is one of our core CSR goals and the aim of this challenge was to raise levels of financial literacy among students. The approach allowed the teams to gain a basic understanding of trading and the risks and rewards involved.

“We were pleasantly surprised at the level of success from the winning team. After a rocky start, they put their initial learning into practice and continued to build a solid portfolio.”

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