YOUNGSTOWN — Jason Cross eagerly looks forward to one day following in his father’s entrepreneurial footsteps, though he received a frenetic, fast-paced forward motion to being introduced to the initial steps.
“I grew up around businessmen and business people, so it’s definitely something I’m interested in,” said Cross, an Austintown Fitch High School student.
The lightning-fast pace was courtesy of his participation in the Junior Achievement of Eastern Ohio’s second annual Stock Market challenge Friday morning in Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business Administration.
Part of the three-hour competition consisted of giving Cross and the other participants 60 “trading days,” each lasting one minute, which forced them to make quick trading, buying and selling decisions.
In a sense, WCBA was converted into a mini-Wall Street as an estimated 120 high school students representing nine schools in Mahoning, Trumbull, Columbiana and Ashtabula counties, and on teams of three or four each, crowded the space while getting a better sense of how the stock market operates and feels.
The schools were Austintown Fitch, Boardman, Bloomfield, Lakeview and Chalker high schools, as well as David Anderson Junior and Senior High School, Grand Valley Middle and High School, Northeast Ohio IMPACT Academy and Spire Academy in Geneva.
Serving as master of ceremonies was Ken English, a financial advisor with Edward Jones Investments in Austintown. Among other things, English rang a bell in a manner similar to the opening bell on Wall Street that marks the start of the day’s trading.
Above English was a board with fast changing and adjusting figures that resembled that of the New York Stock Exchange (often called “The big board”) and the Nasdaq.
Cross, who hopes to attend YSU, Kent State University or Mount Union University in Alliance, has solid footsteps in which to follow, because his father, Jim Cross, who runs Austintown-based Cross Brothers Landscaping LLC, won an award last year for having the area’s best lawn care service.
While the younger Cross’s career path is a bit murky, he desires to use it as an avenue for making others’ lives easier and better, he said.
“I want a career to help people and do community service or for a charity,” said Cross, who also won a $250 scholarship in 2024 at another Junior Achievement competition.
In addition, he was one of about 22 Austintown Fitch High students on six teams who competed in the event, Nicole Fiddler, who teaches business foundation, management, entrepreneurship and marketing classes at the school, said.
Friday’s competition was intended largely to demonstrate to the students the importance of smart investing while realizing such financial moves carry inherent risks. She also tries to teach them those concepts as they apply to real life, including what can happen, along with how important it is “to say one step ahead,” Fiddler explained.
Earlier this week, one of the ways in which Fiddler prepared her students for the competition was by having a retired financial literacy teacher speak with them. Specifically, the former teacher explained how he anticipated his stock in Disney products would decrease in value during the COVID-19 pandemic but rise again after the health crisis abated. During the pandemic, he also invested in Disney Plus streaming stock, which increased in value because many people used streaming services to watch movies as a way of coping with lockdown edicts, and he made a $6,600 profit, Fiddler recalled.
The students made up 35 teams, Michele Merkel, Junior Achievement of Eastern Ohio’s president, said, adding that she hoped the young people would better understand the mechanics of the stock market and see the importance of investing for one’s future financial well-being.
Each team was tasked with “buying” and “selling” stocks for the students to learn some of the intricacies of investing, trading and diversifying a portfolio while responding to certain world events that often impact and influence market behavior.
Being part of Friday’s challenge may pay dividends for some of them also because YSU offers $1,000 scholarships for students interested in coming to the Williamson College of Business Administration. The competition is a prerequisite for becoming eligible for the scholarship, Merkel said.
Also, it’s vital the students learn that long-term investments in the stock market can come with lower risks attached than doing so in the short run, she added.
“It’s giving them a taste of Wall Street,” Merkel said.
A general benefit of the Junior Achievement Stock Market challenge was giving the students from the four-county region a stronger sense of the opportunities YSU has to offer them. The event also had the ability to give them a sense of how to network with business connections, she added.
