Week 8: October 24, 2024

What we learned:

• Understanding Currency
• What role does currency play in the stock market?
• What to know before you buy stocks in a different currency

Key learnings: 

• We can determine whether a currency is stronger or weaker than another by searching up the two currencies we are interested in converting between. For example, CAD to USD. 
• When you find the values, e.g. 1.30 CAD = 1 USD, we can determine that USD is a stronger currency than CAD. This is because we can think of it like we are spending 1.30 CAD to get 1 USD - this means we are spending more to get just 1 USD.

What we need to prepare:

• If you were unable to access your account on How the Market Works, please try to get in at home. If you really can't, please make a new account. Here is the link explaining how to make your account. Then please buy a share in whatever company you would like if you have not already done so, preferably make your decision by looking at the market cap for that company on Yahoo Finance. https://explorerhop.com/pages/how-to-find-your-investment-competition
• Once you buy your share/if you already bought the share in class, please write an explanation for why you bought the share. 
• Give me an explanation in your own words of how we can determine which currency is stronger between two currencies, with a real example!

Week 7: October 17, 2024

What we learned:

• Who determines the stock price
• How to read the price & after-hours price
• How not to dive into the market just because of the price (it's not about buying cheap- it's about buying value at good prices)

Key learnings: 

• The open price is the share price at 9:30 AM, the close price is the share price as of 4:00 PM 
• Open prices display a peak because after 4:00 PM, no shares are updated until 9:30 AM the next day. So if you bought a share at 5:00 PM on Tuesday night, it wouldn't show up until 9:30 AM on Wednesday morning
• This happens because of time differences - someone in Japan, for example, would likely not wake up at 3AM to buy a share just because it is in the 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM window in Eastern time! 
• This can also happen because of after hours sales - where big companies like banks make million dollar trades - these are always updated the next morning at 9:30 AM!
• The 52 week range shows us the lowest price and highest price of shares within the last 52 weeks (1 year)
• The day range shows us the lowest and highest price of shares within the day
• The volume - represented by the little bars at the bottom of the graph - show us how many trades are happening! A sudden increase in volume may imply that some sort of big activity is happening in the company. 

Our top 3 leaderboard this week!

1. Ace

2. Oliver

3. Gatsby

Week 6: October 10, 2024

What we learned:

• Market Cap

Key learnings: 

• The market capitalisation (cap) is the total value of all shares in the company
• We can work out market cap by multiplying the number of shares available to the price per share
• Stock issuance is when a company makes more shares available in order for there to be more investment in the company

What we need to prepare:

• Everyone needs to answer the following four questions as homework:
• What is demand?
• What is a market cap?
• What causes changes in the market cap?
• Explain stock issuance with an example.

Week 5: October 3, 2024

What we learned: 

1. What is a broker
2. What companies are on the stock market

Key learnings: 

• Stock brokers are intermediaries, meaning they can help facilitate the buying and selling of stocks
• We have different types of stock exchanges - traditional and electronic - traditional is in person, electronic is with the use of technology online. Fun fact - NASDAQ is totally electronic!
• We bought our first shares on How the Market Works! There should be no more than 2 people buying shares in the same company.

What we need to prepare:

I would like to reiterate that it is crucial that everyone remembers their login details. Please make sure you write them down! To log in to How the Market Works on a home device, simply search up How the Market works and click on the first link. If you have not bought a share yet, please do so over the week and come prepared with the share for next class. If you need help figuring out how to buy a share, please watch the video at this link. Everyone should only have ONE share at this point. 

Everyone is also required to write a short note on the following:

What company did you buy a share in?

What does this company do?

Why did you buy a share in this company?

Week 4: September 26, 2024

What we learned: 

1. Understanding Tickers
2. Identifying companies by their tickers

Key learnings: 

• A ticker is the identifying abbreviation for a company when you are monitoring their stocks
• On ca.finance.yahoo.com, we can look up tickers on the S&P/TSX (Toronto Stock Exchange) to figure out how our company is doing
• Tickers are like airport codes - there are no two that are exactly the same 
• Any American based company will have an alphabetical ticker with no extension e.g. AAPL - Apple, MSFT - Microsoft
• Any company outside of America from a country using a language with a Latin alphabet will have an alphabetical ticker, followed by an extension e.g. TD.TO - Toronto Dominion (based in Toronto, hence the TO).
• Any country that does not mainly speak a language using the Latin alphabet will have a numerical ticker, followed by an extension e.g. 7269.T - Suzuki Motor Corporation (based in Tokyo, hence the T).

What we need to prepare:

Everyone should be set up with an account on How the Market Works, and it is crucial that everyone remembers their login details. If you have not done so yet, please follow these instructions to get set up https://explorerhop.com/pages/how-to-find-your-investment-competition. This is important because we will start using How the Market Works next week, so everyone needs to be ready!

Week 3: NO CLASS

Week 2: September 12, 2024

Hi all! 

Today, we briefly recapped our homework, which was to choose a company which we would like to buy a share in, and do some research on what exactly this company does.

Then, we moved into learning what exactly a stock is, and how to identify which stocks we should look into buying. We started to look at stock market indexes like S&P500. We used the analogy of owning one slice of pizza out of the whole pizza to explain what a share is. We also discussed common and preferred shares, and what some advantages and disadvantages of preferred shares are.

ALL STUDENTS SHOULD USE THIS LINK AND CREATE AN ACCOUNT ON THE VIRTUAL  PLATFORM. https://explorerhop.com/pages/how-to-find-your-investment-competition

At home, please ask your child if they were able to create an account on How The Market Works - if not, please follow the instructions provided at this link and set up an account before next class - if your child is still facing difficulties, they can come to me at the start of next lesson and I will help them. If your child was able to create an account, please remind them that they must remember their login details or they will not be able to access their account.

Important Links: 

NO CLASS NEXT WEEK - SEPTEMBER 19

Week 1: September 5, 2024

Please scroll down for more information on the program.  Every week we will update this blog and the most recent update will be on the top. 

What we learned: 

1. What is an investment
2. What is a Portfolio + Parts of a Portfolio
3. Advice from the Greatest Investors of our time
4. Introduction to Risk

Key learnings: 

• Never invest in something you don't understand. 
• Everyone makes mistakes. There is no need to get upset. Learn from it and fix it. 
• Invest in a company where the founder has a vision and can clearly articulate and put it into practice. 

What they need to do:

• Come next week with the name of one company and be prepared to clearly say what it does. 
• For example, if it's a pharmaceutical company what drugs does it make and why do they think that is important. 

Important Links: 

For parents:  For parents who are also interested in learning about Investing, we offer online self-learning courses in several languages.   Please click the language you are interested in to see the program.  We have numerous parents who choose to level up their investing knowledge while their kids are learning. 

Learn Investing in: English  French   Spanish  Arabic  Mandarin

Introduction to the program

Welcome to Camp Millionaire - an internationally recognized program that teaches early financial literacy to kids. 

Our company was founded by a Giles Alumni! It's pretty exciting to be back at Giles! The company was founded by a student who was only  in Grade 4 at Giles.  From our humble beginnings on a desk in Giles where the incredible teachers helped her, the idea grew into a company that has offered financial literacy education to more than 10,000 kids! We are not shy when telling the world what an incredible and empowering education is offered at Giles. Read more about our incredible co-founder here. 

For parents:  For parents who are also interested in learning about Investing, we offer online courses in several languages.   Please click the language you are interested in to see the program.  We have numerous parents who choose to level up their investing knowledge while their kids are learning. 

Learn Investing in: English  French   Spanish  Arabic  Mandarin

This blog will provide both students and parents with a view on what was covered and any tasks they may have at home.  Please book-mark this page so you have it handy. 

About the program: 

In this course, students will master the fundamentals of investing. Throughout this course, students will use the knowledge they’ve gained to try their stock trading skills in our global investment challenges.

As a result of this course students will be able to:

• Gain basic trading knowledge (i.e. investments, stock market, tickers, market cap, beta, dividends, earnings, and currency)
• Students will learn how to make basic calculations (Earnings Per Share, Price to Earning Ratio)
• Students learn how to read graphs and are given pro tips to make good choices.
• It's fair to say that at the end of the program, you will know more about stock investing than 75% of the adult population! How's that for setting yourself up for success?

Meet your Instructor



The instructor for this program is Mahveen Khalil. Mahveen has been teaching our programs in schools for more than a year and is very much loved by the students. She is studying psychology at the University of Toronto. She has lived in more than 4 countries and brings a very international perspective to her classes. She is also extremely money savvy. 

She can be reached via email: Mahveen@explorerhop.com

 Outline of the course (this may change a bit based on the pace of the course):