Mathematical model of a stock market

Stock Market Challenge gives students the opportunity to apply and develop their understanding of mathematics and their reasoning skills in a practical activity. It demonstrates how numbers function in a real world context. The game data can be automatically exported to Excel to allow graphical or tabular analysis. 

Bringing maths to life

Stock Market Challenge gives students the opportunity to develop their knowledge and understanding of mathematics in an immersive, group activity. 

Players experience directly how numbers can be used to represent complex patterns of behaviour e.g. how the actions of individual companies and investors can be tracked and summarised by a set of share price data and how this data can be interpreted. 

Practical skills

Stock Market Challenge enables a teacher to present the “applications, implications and critical understanding associated with making maths relevant” in an accessible way. It makes the key processes of representing, analysing and interpreting maths in the real world accessible and immediate. It provides an environment where practical numeracy skills can be used and developed. 

Aspects of the curriculum

Students will learn how to:

understand and manage money reason with numbers communicate mathematical information.

 The specific tasks they will complete include:

managing a portfolio of shares,calculating profit and loss,analysing percentage gains and losses,analysing game data.

Progression

Stock Market Challenge is a valuable tool at all stages of education and provides a useful bridging activity between KS3 and KS4. 

At Key Stage 3 we recommend introducing students to the Trading Floor version, which is much more accessible for first time players, younger students and lower-ability students. It meets the requirements of the KS3 Maths Curriculum by offering an opportunity for practical work in which they draw inferences from data and in demonstrating how statistics are used in real life to make informed decisions. 

Beyond the resource

Both within the game and in follow-up exercises students will explore, discuss, and learn to talk about their methods and explain their reasoning. 

Students could be asked to present the game data in graph, diagram or chart form, or to track the variation of a share price or of an entire portfolio over the course of a trading day. They could be asked to reporting in words, numbers and graphs to an imaginary investor on the performance of the fund managed during the week’s trading. 

The game data can be automatically exported to Excel to allow graphical or tabular analysis. Students can construct financial statements using tables and graphs e.g. the amount invested each day; the profit/loss on each day’s trading; the percentage gains/losses each trading day and/or week.