Help a High School with a Trading Project

Discussion in 'Commodity Futures' started by caroy, Sep 13, 2008.

  1. caroy

    caroy

    Dear Fellow Traders,

    By day I work as a principal of a Catholic High School. Each year I work with our econ classes to teach a unit on futures trading. The unit culminates with a creation of our own mock futures pit.

    We broadcast our pit live via the web on ustream.tv. and the kids execute the orders in the pit. I need your help. I need knowledgeable individuals to sign up to play the role of retail customers calling in orders to our pit.

    Our first round of trading will be on October 2,3 from 10:30-11:05 CST. If interested sign up on the link below and we will email you more info.

    We will be trading the mock value of a gasoline contract worth 1,000 gallons. Each 1 cent tick is worth $10.

    link here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/pndhs.org/gform?key=pq6e53LgaxLTtaLERs4qPYg&hl=en#edit

    here is a video of last year's class in action:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N08FMvZAnhw
     
  2. caroy

    caroy

  3. Joab

    Joab

    No disrespect but other then the FUN part of this, WHY are you teaching a job skill to students in a field that will no longer exist in a few more years?

    Pit trading will be obsolete very soon.

    Why not teach them something more useful?

    oh wait

    I forgot this is high school and relevance to the real world, isn't important. :D




    Best of luck with your project :)
     
  4. That is a great idea, I wish my HS would have had something like that.
     
  5. rosy2

    rosy2

    this is why the educational system is a joke.

    what's the point of this for the students? they execute orders; big deal a monkey can do that.
     
  6. jtnet

    jtnet

    heres a thought, why dont u throw the whole school in the auditorium there and tell them just to talk and try and do your thing so the kids have to scream like lunatics.

    p.s. i thought jews make better pit traders
     
  7. I tend to be critical of primary and secondary school education.

    Having said that, this appears to be an excellent project for a high school economics class.

    In my view, this project is not about teaching students the pit trading profession, per se.

    Rather, it is about teaching students about live auctions, supply, demand, price discovery, crowd behavior, mechanisms of capitalism, purpose of futures contracts, and so on. Whether or not we have pits, these economic elements will persist in one form or another.

    Kudos to the principal for creating a project that will engage students and enable them to practice real economic activities -- activities that have been around since the Japan rice futures exchange in the early 1700s, if not earlier in Ancient Greece.
     
  8. Joab

    Joab


    Catholics ARE new Jews.

    Jesus Christ (in the flesh) was a Rabbi. :)
     
  9. How many orders have you filled in a pit?

    It's not as easy executing orders in the pit as some would think. Little things like outtrades, fast markets, and mistakes all add up.
     
  10. Guys,
    It's HIGH SCHOOL. This is not trading from Goldman Sachs. The fact that these kids will even know what a futures contract is puts them ahead of the game. The fact that the know about trading and pits (regardless if still around in physical form) puts them WAY ahead of the game.

    Most HS students don't even know how to balance a checkbook, let alone perform a mock trading pit in futures.

    But this is clearly why you are not an administrator at a school and thank goodness for that.

    :D
     
    #10     Sep 13, 2008