TOLEDO, Ohio — Students at Jones Leadership Academy got to be what some would call "day traders;" spending their afternoon on Toledo's version of Wall Street.
"It's been very stressful. Running around a lot, trying to catch the people who buy and trade for us," Jones Leadership Academy senior Teontre Kiser said.
It's all part of the Stock Market Challenge, hosted by Junior Achievement of Northwest Ohio.
The goal is to help students learn the ins and outs of the financial world.
"This is just the starting point of learning about the stock market. We don't expect them to be experts today, we just want to build excitement and start to inspire them to want to learn more," Junior Achievement President Jim Pollock said.
The students are split into groups and have to determine the right time to buy and sell their investments based on how the market is doing and they say there's a method to the madness.
"We try to focus on stocks that had dividends like the oil companies and stuff like that. We were in first place the majority of the time and our companies went up a lot," student Lagarius Shabazz said.
TPS Superintendent Romules Durant says this event teaches students the concept of money and how to use the stock market to grow that money.
"When I think about the compound interest I could have earned if I only knew the knowledge they know today, things would have been more in regards to the wealth personally and within my own family," he said.
Even though it's a challenge, it's not about winning or losing; it's about the students learning and understanding of financial literacy.
"The stock market is a very interesting and complicated thing to learn, so doing this is helping me better understand it and to do it in the future," Kiser said.
Durant says he hopes they're able to continue this stock market challenge, because experiences like these at Jones Leadership Academy are going to help students with money and how to manage it.