USU students put stock in more than education
The only sound louder than the hum of computers in BUS 115 were the students whispering in the back.
“I’m very undecided.”
“Our markets are already messed up.”
“We should wait.”
It was Sept. 16, just one day before the Federal Reserve made their decision to not raise interest rates. But the students in the back of BUS 115 didn’t know that yet. Their grades and $50,000 from D.A. Davidson were on the line.
Yet this was an investing practicum, practice for the real-world of investing that some students at Utah State University are already familiar with.
Economics and Financial department senior lecturer Paul Fjeldsted said in his investing practicum class, students practice presenting ideas, making decisions and living with those decisions through investing.
“We’re actually dealing with actual money and so you make decisions differently rather than if we were just doing a simulated test” said Austin Smoot, a junior in finance and economics. “It works with your instincts on the decisions you make really count for something, that goes really well with experience that looks really good on a resume when you want to go into finance.”
Finance senior Parker Harris said that though it is nice to practice investing with someone else’s money, he hopes to learn finance tricks from this class that will help him make his own future investments.
“I haven’t been super active in my own personal investing,” Harris said. “As I pull from a whole class of people that know more than I do or have different experiences I’ll start playing around with more money in the stock market.”
This sentiment is shared by finance senior Nick Fetty.
“I’ve got a 401K,” Fetty said, “but like Parker said, I really don’t feel comfortable investing my own money and choosing my own stocks right now. So right now it’s just a managed account but this class should hopefully give me some expertise in what to look for in investments.”
There are many reasons why students don’t invest, Fjeldsted said, student loans, credit card debt, limited income are just a few.
“I suspect that one of the big hurdles is just knowing what to do,” Fjeldsted said. “You wouldn’t expect people to know this naturally just by watching the news.”
Knowing where to find widely-accepted information is also a challenge, and the only way Fjeldsted said to get around it is by talking with others knowledgeable about investing and researching online.
That’s why finance senior Gregory Dudley turned to Fjeldsted and an app called Robinhood for the investments he made on his own.
Dudley said he’s a “horrible spender.” But once Fjeldsted took him under his wing, Dudley said he began to look into investing.
That’s when he found Robinhood, an app that helps users invest without a brokerage fee.
With the app, Dudley bought stocks in Starbucks, two automobile suppliers, Fitbit and Verizon.
“Starbucks has been my real bread and butter lately,” he said. “I was patient through the most recent sell off. The stock market has been so up the last month and a half but I didn’t sell anything. I just held through it all and now it’s going up a little bit so hopefully my patience will pay off.”
Jameson Hartman a senior in finance also uses Robinhood, though he was investing long before he began to use the app.
As a child, Hartman said he was “super frugal” with his money, watching it accumulate interest in his bank account. Then as a sophomore in high school, Hartman said he decided to invested in Amazon stock.
“To be honest, some investing is just glorified gambling,” he said. “So it was just kind of like this rush that I got in high school. I would watch my little trading account and ‘day trade’ but I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just an adrenaline kick.”
Hartman said as he learned more, he began to branch away from “risky investing” and became more knowledgeable about investing. Now he said he invests in the S&P 500, an index of stock made of 500 American companies.
Fjeldsted said if students know what they are looking for, they are in prime position to invest in long-term ventures.
Ryan Taylor, a graduated USU international business and economics major agrees, but adds that students should avoid investing if they have a lot of credit card debt.
But the type of investing venture is up to the student and their “appetite for risk,” Fjeldsted said.
“In investing in stocks, there’s really no such thing as safe,” he said. “So the question is whether it’s diversified. A broadly diversified portfolio is something that’s really important.”
For college students hesitating to invest because of the risk, Hartman had some advice.
“Just try it,” he said. “If you want to learn how it works, just try it.”
— katie.l.lambert26@gmail.com
twitter: @klamb92