Investment Club receives $5,000

by Alex Wang, Reporter

The Investment Club received $5000 in December from a private donation to invest in the real stock market.

“We asked the school for a portion of the Harker Endowment, and it gave it to us to actually invest in the stock market,” said Ameek Singh (12), co-founder and co-president of the club.

Ameek, Raymond and Sanil originally started the club after they competed in the Stock Market Game as part of DECA and placed at ICDC. They realized that, while many teams at the upper school competed in the game, there was no one to teach investment strategy to participants. They worked with Thompson to fill the gap, creating the Investment Club.

The club hopes to use the donation to allow members to expand their experience from a virtual stock market to the actual stock market.

“[The money] will allow for the Investment Club members to learn about investment through hands-on learning,” Ameek said.

The club has had the donation approved by the Board of Trustees and is in the process of setting up a fidelity account to use to invest. The club will be able to invest once it gains permission from the club advisor, Chris Thompson, regarding the trade.

The club wants to use this investment to allow its members to apply their knowledge in the actual stock market.

“We felt that having real money to invest is a more educational opportunity for students, with a risk involved,” Sanil Rajput (12), the other co-founder and co-president of the club said.

The club is required to follow a set of Harker’s investing principles. These include investing in companies that have a market cap, or total value of all shares of the company, of over a billion dollars, investing in companies that do not support bad causes, such as pollution or environmental degradation, and no short selling, which involves borrowing and selling stocks when they have high prices and then buying them back and returning them when they become less valuable.

“We are following some guidelines of value investing modeled after Warren Buffett and the Bible of value investing, The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham,” said Raymond Xu (11), vice president and another co-founder of the investment club.

The club meets during long lunches at the Innovation Center.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on March 3, 2016.