The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Middle school student awarded in competition
TORRINGTON — Torrington Middle School student Gabriel Mazzacane, 13, has developed an investment strategy primed for long-term financial success, in the SIFMA Foundation’s Spring 2022 InvestWrite competition.
Competing in the middle school division, Mazzacane researched and composed an impressive long-term financial plan and now he is being recognized as first place in the state of Connecticut. He was surprised with an award on June 20 in his classroom at TMS, with his teacher, Suzanne Spalinger.
SIFMA Foundation’s InvestWrite national essay competition bridges classroom learning in math, social studies, and language arts with the practical research and knowledge required for saving, investing and long-term planning. It also serves as a culminating activity for The Stock Market Game ™ curriculumbased financial education program that challenges students to manage a hypothetical $100,000 online portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds and cash over a period of 14- weeks, a semester or a school year.
“The SIFMA Foundation ensures young people of all backgrounds are better prepared for their financial lives,” said Melanie Mortimer, President of the SIFMA Foundation. “We congratulate Gabriel on this remarkable achievement and commend his teacher and school for their commitment to financial education.”
The Spring 2022 InvestWrite competition asked fourth through 12th graders: What is something you learned about investing that you didn’t know before participating in The Stock Market Game. Explain how this can help your future and help others. If you were investing $100,000 to perform well over the next 30 years, what stocks, bonds, and mutual funds would you choose and why? Mazzacane wowed the panel of expert judges with his thoughtful and insightful essay, below.
Winning essay by Gabriel Mazzacane
You are sitting on the couch at home when you get an email. It informs you that you have just received $100,000! But there is one caveat. You can’t go shopping with it. You have to invest it in something. What do you buy?
Throughout the past month, me and the twenty or so people in my class participated in The Stock Market Game, along with hundreds of other people across the country. We did this to learn about how the news influences the stock market, and to learn more about the stock market in general. This game taught me that investing can be risky, but if you do your research, you will be safe and successful.
The game taught me how to do so by teaching me about bonds and mutual funds. The first thing that the game taught me was how mutual funds work. Mutual funds are basically a folder of stocks. You hire someone to manage all of the stocks for you. When you invest in a mutual fund, you are partly paying for the stocks and partly paying the managers of the folder. Mutual funds are less risky because they are usually highly diversified. According to the Investment Company Fact Book, about 102.5 million people in America held a mutual fund in 2020. Because of the ease of mutual funds, many people own them. Even my family has invested in a mutual fund. Because of this, I would most likely use mutual funds as a significant portion of my portfolio for a 30-year investment strategy.
The game also taught me what bonds are. A bond is when you lend out your money to a corporation or the government. They promise to give your money back at a certain date, called the maturity date. They also give you interest payments every year at the coupon rate, which is usually around 5%. There are a variety of different bonds, with different maturity dates and coupon rates. The lengths of these bonds can go from anywhere from 1 to 30 years. Bonds are the investments with the least amount of risk. Therefore, bonds will be most of my 30-year SMG portfolio. I will most likely buy government bonds because I feel the government needs some money because of the state of our society.
I can use the things I learned in the Stock Market Game to improve my future and help other people because certain stocks are sustainable. I can invest in companies like Target and Amazon to help our society because they are doing things to help protect our environment. For example, Amazon has a goal of carbon neutrality by 2040. Our planet needs things like this right now. Also, some stocks let you have a voice in the company. The GOOGL (not GOOG) version of Alphabet stock lets you vote on matters of the company. Sustainability and having a voice in companies will help me and many other people.
In conclusion, I would most likely buy shares of the SPY/SPDR ETF, because it matches the stocks in the S&P 500, bonds (like 30-year treasury bonds), and mutual funds (like the FSPHX fund, because healthcare will be a prevalent industry in the near future). I would stay away from stocks because they are the riskiest of the assets available. I would keep a conservative portfolio because I am not one for taking risks.