We played a stock market game in school when I was around 12. It was about a year before I used the internet for the first time, so we were taught to look up stock prices in a newspaper. This was in a math class, and the main focus of the exercise was figuring how many shares we could buy with a certain amount of money and figuring out what the balance would be after a certain amount of time. I picked stocks based on what ticker symbols I liked and most of the ones I picked lost money.
I walked away from the exercise thinking stock price movements were pretty random and that buying stocks was a form of gambling. If I recall correctly, my parents tried to explain that if people thought a company was doing well, stock price went up, and if people thought it was doing poorly, stock price went down. But, I didn't realize that there was anything in the real world that ever tied stock price to the actual value of a company, and I didn't want to bet on what other people were going to think about a company. That perception scared me away from the stock market for many years longer than it should have. While I suppose I was better off having lost fake money making random stock picks than real money, I wish someone had explained the whole thing better. I at least wish someone had tried to convince me that there are less risky ways of putting money into the stock market than buying a handful of stocks based on a gut feeling and planning to sell them after a couple of weeks.
Luckily, it sounds like your daughter is learning a lot more about how stocks work than I did in school. Very cool!
