The KWHS Investment Competition is an initiative from Knowledge@Wharton High School of The Wharton School. It is a 12-week free investment competition for students and educators. While competing we will learn about teamwork, communication, risk, diversification, company analysis, industry analysis and investing from the competition. We as a team of 9 members were responsible for managing a portfolio of $100,000 in virtual cash using the OTIS online trading system. We had to learn concepts and develop strategies based on a case study involving a young, rich investor ( John Abhram ). And at the end of the competition, we were required to submit a document detailing their recommended investment strategy.
I have my career inclined towards investment and the management of portfolios, thus I participated in this competition. Also as this would be a good practice or some type of stimulation before I actually become a professional in this work, I thought of enrolling my name in this competition.
Learning outcome 1 – Identify own strength and develop areas of growth
I have always seen my inclination towards business and economics topics and my knowledge regarding it more than the other subjects, and to be able to make a career related to it and be able to contribute a very little portion of it to our nation’s economy make me feel extremely good. However, to be able to do actually start the career, we need to have some sort experience in the field, which I did not have. Thus getting an opportunity to experience a little of how my life would be after the completion of my studies, was truly amazing.
But with business knowledge as a plus point, I also have a weakness and that is I am an extreme introvert, meaning I don’t like to socialize much. However, if I am choosing a field which requires me to talk to people more frequently than I need and had to decide upon something to work on my this weakness and make me more eligible for my career. Thus I had decided to take part in this competition, which had required me to have a constant communication with my team members and also the advisors. Also, being a leader of the 8 member team, I had to make sure that there are no internal problems within the team-members and also make sure that all team members understand the main purpose of this competition and complete their allocated task.
I think that to develop yourself, you first need to identify your weaknesses and strengths and then decide upon working on your weaknesses and strengthing your strengths. By doing so, you can not only lead yourself in the direction of attaining desired results but also live life satisfyingly and successfully; whereas those who don’t pay attention to their fallibility fall in disgrace and face dismays.
Therefore, Identified my weakness and immediately decided to work on it to develop myself as a better and successful person.
Learning outcome 2 – Demonstrating that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
The most difficult challenge that I faced was that we as a team had very less knowledge of investing, which was the core topic or the main idea used to win the competition. Also, we had some technical problems due to which we were not able to receive any mail from the KWHS group.
These two things were really challenging as first of all, not having any knowledge about the way and strategies of investment on which we had to write a mid-term and final report and also similarly stimulate in the OTIS in order to make it look exactly the same way we have described in the report was really difficult. Second, due to technical problems, we would not able to receive any updates or emails regarding the competition and any change in it by KWHS which may lead to us having an information failure.
To overcome the first challenge, we had some meeting with our advisor, and also the school had arranged an expertise in it in order to clear our doubts about the competition. To understand investment strategies in a more better way, I and my team, we read some ebooks and articles on it. Doing all this had actually helped us to get some idea of investment which in all helped us to stimulate the same on the OTIS. Also as an individual, it helped me to enhance my communication skills, made me more knowledgeable, and helped me to learn how to handle or deal with such situations.
To overcome the second problem, we had requested other team members and teachers, to send us emails received by them from the KWHS team which they gladly did, thus making easy for us to overcome this problem. This helped me to understand that being kind to your opponents is not wrong but actually helps u as a person to bond with others and socialize which is lined up with my career.
Undertaking this type of challenge was seriously helpful because it helped me to understand what actually is the meaning of investment and improved my way of communication and negotiating with the team which would eventually be helpful for me in the future.
Learning outcome 3 – Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Planning in this competition for me means how to actually decide upon the tasks and divide them among the team members seeing their capabilities and also looking after the meeting of deadlines and regularly checking the OTIS ( the trading system of KWHS) to check the updates of the profit and loss of our portfolio.
Organising and Planning is my favorite part of participation in any event or competition because it helps to be more productive, manage time in a better way giving me less stress, giving less chance of procrastination, therefore, in all having a good quality of result in the end that is the execution.
To organize myself in a similar way, I divide the tasks of researching upon the sectors to all the team – members, keeping a regular check on their working and lastly having a meeting and finalizing upon the companies to be invested. Being the leader of the team, I tried to involve everyone’s opinion making sure no one feels left out and everyone gives an equal contribution in the competition so as to earn better results in the end.
The skills I think I learned is management. The major part of planning. Management, because, we had our studies + assessments lined up + some of the team members had their SAT exams which in all made it difficult to actually allocate some tasks to them due to so much of workload. Therefore, planning helped me in managing the team, with regular checking of the trading system, with the increasing study material, which was eventually quite difficult.
Learning outcome 4 – Show commitment and determination
This activity required dedication because it was all about how well we invest according to the requirement of our virtual customer and present our strategy in form of a report. Also with increasing studies and personal work, regularly checking the portfolio value was a bit difficult because of the specific timings, that were given for trading.
The main thing for which we had to have determination was when we were incurring losses which were de-motivating and also having no idea about how to invest was again a negative point. Therefore, to stay in the competition until the end, we needed a commitment to work equally hard for it and give our best even if we don’t win it, which we eventually gave and submitted our final report.
For me, it is easy to commit to things in which I can contribute. And here I can easily contribute my knowledge of business and management skills. Commitment is important for work in which you want excellence in the way you think and work, and thus this passion towards the work makes you committed and persevered towards it and in this case, I had a positive mindset to at least learn something from the competition and my passion towards it kept me going.
Learning outcome 5 – Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
Having a team of 9 members representing themselves as Fountainhead School in an international level competition definitely required us as a team to work collaboratively. I always enjoy working in teams as it finishes the work faster with sharing of different views ( which was important in this activity due to lack about the subject – investment ) and creates a better understanding regarding the team members decreasing the chances of failure if misunderstanding does not occur.
However, working in a team in this activity was a bit difficult. First of all, is the disliking for some of the members of the team for each other. Then the procrastination habit and “We will do it” attitude of some of the members was neither doing good to the team. And lastly, the studies and the ongoing SAT preparation was not at all helping us to focus on the competition and do research about the sectors.
Talking about all this, and being a leader, I surely had to handle all of the above things. For the disliking part, I took up the initiative to work with that particular member and handle the tasks, in order to have a smooth flow of teamwork. For the procrastination thing, we together kept reminding each team member including our self to work on the competition which leads us to finally have fruitful meetings on the weekends. For the last thing, the members who didn’t have their SAT exam were responsible to look after the competition more closely while the others would still try to do some of the work. This all shows the importance of teamwork that was required in this competition.
It is important to collaborate with others in order to learn something new and make your communication and social skills efficient, which I learned by working in this team.
Learning outcome 7 – Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.
Morals are an ethical conduct on playing out a movement. This was an investment competition so while getting private data about a specific organization and utilizing it for your own leeway is exploitative, however, to win and invest in a company we needed to find information about its progress and future plan which may not seem ethical.
The ethical issue affected us indirectly because, though our intention was not against any company but was just for our competition purpose which, however, made us feel a little uncomfortable to sneak out information about the companies without their permission.
Considering my point of view, so using someone for your own purpose without letting the person know is wrong. However, now after taking part in this competition, I have realized that if the benefit that has been taken was not intended or done purposely, so its okay to use the someone which in this case was the information about the company.
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So in all, this activity was fun and it has truly helped me to improve my self giving me a much better picture about my career.
