At the end of October a team of amateur stock brokers from Fountain Hills High School took the top spot in the state Junior Achievement Stock Market Challenge, besting larger schools like Basha High.

The team of Austin Johnson, Riley Gant, Wesley Cottrill, Matthew McDonald and Paige DeSpay took first place at the competition by earning the most money trading fake stocks within a certain period of accelerated time.

The challenge is set up to simulate all the details of a hectic Wall Street bullpen environment.

“It is really all about teamwork,” teacher Randy Bragg said. “You need people to watch the news and people to watch the trends. There were also traders whose attention you had to grab; it was a lot like the real thing.”

Bragg’s class, along with other FHHS social studies classes, had been learning about the stock market leading up to the competition.

“A volunteer comes in to do a series of lessons on how the Stock Market works, buying and selling and all that,” Brag said. “Then we ran computer simulations to mimic the market to practice for the competition.”

And it does take practice to get into the mindset of a day trader, as the students from the winning team will tell you.

“It definitely took a while to get the hang of,” Cottrill said. “The first couple of simulations we had technical difficulties and we actually never broke a million.”

“We hadn’t even won in class,” McDonald said. “The closest we got was second.”

The team members did not let this fact dissuade them going into the main competition, however, and along with conquering the stocks the team also found creative solutions to other issues.

“A lot of our communication was over headphones on phone calls,” Johnson said.

“It was a huge advantage,” Gant added. “Because a lot of the teams had to keep running back and forth but we were getting real-time updates over the phone.”

The team became so absorbed in trading that their fellow FHHS teams had to tell them they had taken the lead.

“Even when we got called up to the stage we didn’t realize how well we did. We thought, okay, we got third place,” Cottrill said.

For Bragg, the best moment of this underdog victory was the excitement from the other FHHS teams.

“The thing I was most proud of was how happy the other groups where for the winning team,” Bragg said. “It really was a school win.”