GHS Finance Club is captivated by stocks

“It’s just kind of like a matter of pattern recognition”

Jaden Vibberts, president of the GHS Finance Club, explains the drive to seek out and understand finance, a series of related patterns.

Finance is the epitome of interconnectedness, and the Finance Club lays out this dynamic, focusing their interests on personal investment yet placing an observant eye on the bigger macroeconomic waves of the global economy. 

Vibberts and his vice president Trevor Ganzer sought out to equip high schoolers with financial savviness: they spend each meeting covering a particular topic like “how to practically invest and take everything you’ve learned from the year before and actually implement it.”

The club has an affectionate fascination with studying stock market strategies. Vibberts says “we have this investing competition on Investopedia…”. Within the school, the competition comprises about 30 people who receive about $100,000 of simulated money they can invest at their savvy discretion. A separate competition is also ongoing with Arcadia High School in which the schools’ average returns are compared to determine a winner. For the club, finance is both an act of active gameplay and an intellectual study.

With such a sharply honed acumen, Vibberts and his club also bear some perspective on this year’s Trumpian tariffs. He had a less-than-complimentary opinion on the economic policy, commenting that it’s “not just about the impact on the stock market, but I think it just hurts globalization as a whole, since it definitely disincentivizes free trade.”

“I think in reality all that’s really gonna do is hurt the consumer at the end of the line, since companies will just have to raise their own prices to account for the goods they import and things like that.”

Vibberts even postulates the possibility of an economic “arms race” of tariff percentages. Whether this will impact their Investopedia results is still to be seen, but it surely will redirect the patterns of the American economy.