Helen Michele McVey

McVey’s winning program, “Finance Your Future”, is designed to increase financial literacy and increase students’ awareness of the stock market. It includes the use of The Stock Market Game, a program of the SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) Foundation. As the students work in teams, they will receive virtual cash accounts of $100,000. They will work together to build a  portfolio by researching and evaluating stocks and making informed decisions regarding the buying and selling of those stocks. Interest and commissions will both be earned and paid as each team trades on both the NYSE and the NASDAQ exchanges. The teams will then compete with each other and across the state to see which team in the program produced the most successful portfolio, giving students an added incentive to work hard. Students will be required to log into their accounts weekly to check their stocks, research market trends, and decide if they would like to make any changes. McVey, who lives in Stafford, wants to encourage and motivate the students to work hard and not give up when their decisions fail to produce the returns they expected.