The Wharton Global High School Investment Competition offers high school students the opportunity to create a unique investment strategy to manage a simulated portfolio using Wharton’s Investment Simulator.
What makes this program so unique? Teams are not deemed successful in the net profit they have generated from their investments, but rather from the quality and reasoning behind their investment strategies.
“Everyone had to dive super deep into the technical aspects of finance to make this possible.”
Drew Carrasco ’26
Fifth Former Drew Carrasco and Sixth Formers Kevin Covington and Ben McDade each led one of the three Haverford teams in the competition. Carrasco’s team, The Fordman Sachs, advanced to the semifinals. Out of 1800 total teams in the competition, they were one of the 50 teams that advanced.
Making it to the semifinals was no easy task.
“The hardest part of the competition, in my opinion, was getting a group of seven people together, all with different levels of education in finance, and all with different abilities,” Carrasco said. “Everyone had to dive super deep into the technical aspects of finance to make this possible.”
The Fordman Sachs compiled a fourteen-page report detailing the companies they would invest in, how much of the allotted cash they would invest into each company, and how these investments would prove beneficial for someone’s portfolio.
“After submitting the report and looking back on the long seven months that it took us to research, collaborate, and construct this portfolio, we got a very nice final product, and that was the most rewarding part of the competition—knowing that this was time well spent,” Carrasco said.
Although rewarding, The Fordman Sachs are not done with the competition. They are now creating a ten-minute-long presentation on their portfolio. According to Carrasco, the teams “are trying to visualize all of the writing we did for our written report and make a very concise and eye-appealing presentation off of the information that we’ve gathered over the past semester.”
