As Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” That idea is at the heart of Christopher Ward’s winning essay, which emphasized the value of building financial stability through informed investing. Christopher, a student at Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School in Port Washington, New York, is planting the seeds for a financially secure future. His thoughtful, long-term investment plan earned a prestigious 1st in New York and 3rd place win nationally in the SIFMA Foundation’s Spring 2025 InvestWrite® competition, the nation’s premier youth financial writing challenge.
Chosen from thousands of entries, Christopher’s essay demonstrated a clear understanding of diversification, long-term investing, and risk—core concepts that define smart financial decision- making. Christopher and teacher Jennifer Herber were honored by the SIFMA Foundation in a ceremony held on Friday, September 19.
InvestWrite is the capstone to the SIFMA Foundation’s Stock Market Game™, a curriculum-based simulation in which students manage a hypothetical $100,000 portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and cash. The program has reached more than 23 million students since 1977 and is widely recognized for improving academic achievement in math, economics and personal finance. “We’re thrilled to celebrate Christopher for this outstanding achievement,” said Melanie Mortimer, President of the SIFMA Foundation. “This is a powerful example of how financial education helps young people take control of their futures. By understanding long-term investing, students like Christopher are building not just portfolios, but real financial confidence, know-how and independence.”
Each year, InvestWrite challenges students to apply what they’ve learned in the Stock Market Game to a real-world investing scenario. Thousands of financial professionals across the country volunteer to judge the essays, selecting winners who demonstrate depth of knowledge, critical thinking, and a practical vision for financial independence.
Amidst rapid growth of new online investing tools and social media Finfluencers, SIFMA Foundation has stepped up its efforts to provide tools for individuals to understand the fundamentals of risk-managed investing. Offered free of charge at www.stockmarketgame.org, SMG InvestQuest is an online, 30-minute investing simulation that spans five years of real market activity and challenges users to allocate a hypothetical investment portfolio in response to news and industry trend reports.
SMG InvestQuest emphasizes asset allocation, portfolio diversification, and long-term investing. It is available online anytime to individuals, families, and educators who want to try their hand at learning or teaching investing basics. Additionally, in response to growing demand for families to build their financial savvy and engage in educational summer fun, SIFMA Foundation is launching The Stock Market Game Summer Session. Offered June 30 – August 8, 2025, SMG Summer Session is a free, national investing competition in which family members can challenge each other as individuals or teams. Youth participants are eligible to compete for prizes, receive certificates of completion, and build essential financial skills over the summer. Registration is available at smg.stockmarketgame.org/# “Our summer and digital programs extend these opportunities beyond the classroom and into everyday life,” Mortimer added. “Whether through SMG InvestQuest or our SMG Summer Session, we are creating more pathways for young people and their families to learn, grow, and achieve their financial dreams.”
In the Spring essay writing competition, 4th–12th grade students were asked to reflect on their Stock Market Game portfolios and consider the following questions: “What’s your dream for the future? What did you learn in the Stock Market Game that could help you achieve this dream? If you had $10,000 to invest now, what would you invest in, including at least one of your Stock Market Game investments, to achieve your dream in 10 years?” Students were challenged to explain their investment strategy and recommend a future approach to saving or investing that reflects their understanding of a sound, diversified financial plan.
Winning Essay
My classroom experience while participating in the Stock Market Game has forever changed my views on investing. Initially, my group and I thought we would do well with high-risk investments, like stocks, which would earn us a lot of money and put us in first place. However, due to events like changing tariff policies and a stock market slump, we had considerable losses and had to reconsider our strategies. After debating our options, we recently decided that we have to diversify our portfolio more and focus on lower risk investments. A dream that I have for the future is to become a doctor. Realizing this dream would improve my life by allowing me to earn enough to enjoy a good standard of living including enough to purchase my own home. My dream could positively affect my family, as I could buy things for my parents that they have always wanted. I would do this to thank them for raising me and taking care of me. Realizing my dream would give me more than financial security, it would allow me to give back to my community by helping people who are sick and in need of help. In conclusion, my dream coming true would positively affect me and let me help others as well.
My dream to become a doctor requires significant financial investment including expensive tuition and medical school thereafter. Investing today in the long term will help me with any payments I need for more education, including any student debt that I accumulate after.
In a $10,000 portfolio of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, I would want to make sure to diversify my investments as much as I could. With a portfolio worth $10,000, I would invest 40% in stocks, 20% in bonds, 15% in mutual funds, 15% in certificates of deposit, and 10% in cash for any future investments or anything short term that comes up. I learned this as a lesson from my Stock Market Game portfolio. Our Stock Market Game portfolio is 80% stocks, 14% mutual funds, and 6% cash. At first, we had only invested in stocks. We thought if we took higher risks, we would break big and reach first place. However, this mindset negatively affected us, as certain events, including tariffs, led the stock market to decline majorly.
This decline in the stock market led to us losing 4% of our net equity, as we had more than 50% of our portfolio in stocks, including companies like AMD, General Motors, and Nvidia. Our group discussed what happened and realized we had too much money in stocks. We recently decided to sell the stocks that we gained on and start investing in safer options like bonds and mutual funds. We hope this will help us regain our money and even make some profit.
With my stocks, I would invest in a mix of high growth companies and value companies. A growth- oriented company that I would invest in right now would be Nvidia (NVDA). Nvidia is a technology company that makes GPUs, software, and systems for AI. Nvidia has a market cap of $2.65 trillion and a 36.99 PE ratio. Even though our portfolio lost some money on it, I believe it is still a great high return stock to invest in and the outlook looks promising. I would invest in Nvidia especially right now as it is near a 52-week low, and with strong analyst price targets (average around $172.36). I believe that it would be a good high return stock to invest in. To offset this higher risk investment, I would also invest in some value-oriented Blue-Chip companies like Walmart (WMT), with its low beta of .54 and its solid stock price growth throughout the years.
My 20% in bonds would go to bonds with low interest rates and good reputations, like government bonds, which have almost no risk of not being paid. My 15% in mutual funds would go to reputable companies that have invested for a long time. An example of a mutual fund I would invest in is the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFIAX). The Vanguard 500 Index is a fund focused on investing in the general US market. The fund is from a registered investment company that is reputable (Vanguard), and the fund has been around since September 7th, 2010. The fund has a five-star Morningstar. A five-star Morningstar rating means they have historically performed in the top 10% of their class in terms of returns.
My 15% certificate of deposit would go into a safe FDIC insured bank to ensure I would get my money back in case the bank goes out of business. Currently, one can get CD rates around 5% APY for a 10- year CD, which is a relatively attractive return given the low risk of the investment. The most important thing I would do with these investments is to diversify my investments and not only stick to one investment for each.
My long-term portfolio will help me attain my dream, as it will help me with paying off college loans and funding living expenses during medical school. With how I have planned my portfolio, I believe it would strike the right balance between growing significantly over the 10-year span while ensuring capital preservation to enable me to pay off a good portion of my loans as needed.
With the Stock Market Game, I have learned a lot about how to invest. I learned important principles for sound investing from when to buy stock to what percentage of the portfolio should be bonds, stock, or mutual funds. Lastly, I learned the importance of a long-term mindset, instead of only focusing on short term effects. With the knowledge I have acquired, I feel that I can make good investments that can help me achieve my dreams and live a successful life.
Chris Ward places first in NY state.
Ms. Jennifer Herber, Chris Ward, Dr. Kathryn Behr.
