Armorel student is Arkansas champ in stock contest

LITTLE ROCK-- Most adults need years of study and experience to develop the financial savvy to navigate the markets with success, and many don't even get started.

But three Arkansas students, including a sixth-grader from Armorel, proved they are way ahead of their much older peers when they each became state winners in a recent national investment essay competition.

Samantha FitzPatrick, a sixth-grader at Armorel Elementary School, was the Arkansas champion in the grades 6-8 category of the SIFMA Foundation's InvestWrite essay competition, co-sponsored by McGraw Financial and delivered in Arkansas by Economics Arkansas. Her winning essay, "Why We Bought Walmart," describes her research strategies of several major companies as investment choices.

The other Arkansas winners are Dylan Mosakowski, a fith-grader at Warren Dupree Elementary School in Jacksonville, who won in the grades 4-5 category, and Brianna Bowerman, a 2014 graduate of a 2014 graduate of Shiloh Christian School in Springdale, who won in the grades 9-12 category.

The winners and their teacher advisors each received a $50 gift certificate, a T-shirt, a medal and a certificate of accomplishment. The three honorees were among the 20,000 students in grades 4-12 across the nation who take the InvestWrite challenge each year.

Launched in 2004, the SIFMA Foundation's InvestWrite competition serves as a culminating activity for nearly 600,000 students in grades 4-12 nationwide who participate in the Stock Market Game program each year, a simulation investment program. InvestWrite invites those students to analyze an investment scenario and recommend portfolio allocations targeting short- and long-term financial goals. Participants consider real-world economic events and trends, conduct research online, develop investment recommendations and, in the process, gain the skills to prepare for their own financial future. Winning essays are chosen based on the students' understanding of asset allocation, the stock market, and factors that drive investments as well as their expression of investment ideas in essay form. In 2013 and 2014, the program was made possible by McGraw Hill Financial.

Samantha competed in the Stock Market Game and InvestWrite program under the guidance of Debra Harms, a gifted and talented teacher at Armorel. Samantha dances competitively and also likes to play soccer and basketball.

Her award-winning essay:

Why We Bought Wal-Mart

For my stock market team we decided to just buy stocks, because that is what we are familiar with and we did not want to get in to anything different that we would not know how to control and keep up with. Plus, when you want to buy a stock that has so many competitors you have to research so much; consequently, mutual funds are the same way. You also have to research a lot on each and every stock that the company owns. The thing that I absolutely hate is when everything looks good then you find a poor stock with a bad record and reputation. Sometimes it is not so horrible, but when the stock is doing so bad that it makes your mutual fund do bad; you have to start all of your research over with something new and there goes all of your hard work.

My team decided to purchase Nike and Wal-Mart. We were going to by Hershey before Valentine's Day and sell it after Valentine's Day. The reason is, because when we would have bought it before Valentine's Day, it would have been low and cheap and near Valentine's Day, at its high, we would have sold it. We did not get the time to buy it so all of that never happened.

We bought Wal-Mart because we are familiar with it and know that it does very well. We compared Wal-Mart to Lowes, Walgreens, and Kroger. We decided to Google their ticker symbols since we did not know them. The symbols are WMT, WOG, KR, and LOW. We looked at their betas to see the risk in them. Wal-Mart's beta is 0.4 which is the least risky. I know that you do not want a beta of 1.0 or above. Walgreen's is 1.2, Kroger's is 0.97, and Lowes's is 1.13. Kroger is the only one out of those three who does not have a beta over 1.0; although, it is only 0.03 away from being 1.0, therefore we knew that we did not want Walgreens or Lowes. We then decided to do a little bit more research on Kroger and Wal-Mart. We wanted to buy something in the bear market that was sure to be in the bull soon. So we saw that Kroger was bull and going up, and Wal-Mart was bear and going down. The reason that we wanted to buy something in the bear was because we wanted it to rise and be bull for us to gain money. But that was not going to be what decided whether or not we were going to buy the stock. We then went on further in our research. So we looked at their highs and lows and a chart that showed their company throughout the years. We compared them on a line graph and by far Wal-Mart was the best. So, we went a little bit further and decide that Wal-Mart was the best out of all the four.

Because we bought Wal-Mart we ended the stock market in 27. That was the highest that we have ever been. If we had not made the decision to do all that research then we would not have gotten were we did.