Despite the recent roller coaster in the stock market, some students at Metropolitan State University of Denver took what they learned in class and turned it into a net positive.

It’s been a wild ride on Wall Street these past few months as the threat of tariffs fueled a bear market and stock prices dropped.

“I wish all markets were always bull markets,” said MSU Denver Finance Professor Adam Schor.

During all of this, students from his advanced investment course got to try their hand at investing $100,000 of real money.

For five years, Scor and the University have been letting the students invest with money from the MSU Denver Foundation. Schor said it really drives home the theory he teaches in the classroom.

“The feeling of putting real money to work and seeing real money go up or seeing your values go down. You can’t compare that to writing a number in a spreadsheet or just putting a little email together,” said Schor.

He said that when we see a stock market roller coaster like we have experienced so far this year, in the investing world, it separates the wheat from the chaff.

“Everyone thinks you’re a genius in a bull market, right? Everyone is a hero. But understanding what happens when things don’t go your way and how you respond is crucial,” said Schor.

His students faced a steep challenge, investing at a historically volatile time in the market. They said through it all, sticking to the things they learned in class really helped them.

“We’re all sticking to our fundamentals, sticking to our valuation to stay out of the reactionary aspects and be more logical in how we approach our investments,” said student Dayna Marshall

In the end, they outperformed top market indexes by about 20%, and they claim they didn’t lose sleep over it.

” A lot of us saw it as an opportunity to build up our portfolio,” said Marshall.

Professor Schor says he believes them, but more importantly, this class and the bear market prepared his students to be top notch investors.

“This class is about really honing your analytical skills and becoming more prepared for the job market. And that’s what I think we’ve done this semester, ” said Schor.

Michael Abeyta

Michael Abeyta is a general assignment reporter/MSJ for CBS News Colorado. Read his latest reports or check out his bio and send him an email.

Twitter

Facebook