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Build a hypothetical stock portfolio in this three-week personal finance course for middle school students on UCLA’s campus.
Instructor:
Course Description
Choose companies you’re curious about, investigate how they work and build a hypothetical stock portfolio. Then track what happens and explain the decisions behind your choices.
Explore how investment goals and risk shape a portfolio. Use stock screeners to investigate companies, compare financial statements and calculate ratios that raise questions about financial health. Company profiles and industry research help you examine products, competitors and management. As you learn more, revisit your choices and the share of the portfolio assigned to each company. Calculate return on investment and consider how taxes and fees can change the result.
Personal finance activities connect those investment questions with everyday decisions. Try a budgeting simulation, examine credit and use a compound-interest calculator to compare scenarios. Changing one input gives you a way to see how time or an interest rate affects a calculation. For the capstone, prepare a presentation explaining your portfolio, the research behind it and its performance. The work combines financial investigation with the challenge of making your reasoning clear to someone else.
This three-week Summer Discovery course for middle school students takes place at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Beyond class, students connect active academic exploration with campus life, growing independence, new friendships and a clearer sense of what they may want to explore next.
What Will You Do?
• Research companies and industries using stock screeners and company information
• Compare financial statements and calculate selected ratios
• Build and track a hypothetical stock portfolio
• Calculate returns and examine the effects of taxes and fees
• Explore budgeting, credit and compound interest through games and calculations
• Present your portfolio choices, supporting research and performance
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Compare investments using research, financial information and a stated risk profile
• Calculate a hypothetical portfolio’s return and explain factors that affect it
• Present financial choices using evidence and clear reasoning
You’ll leave with your hypothetical portfolio record and capstone presentation, plus experience investigating financial decisions and identifying questions you want to explore further.
Why Personal Finance Skills Matter
A financial choice depends on the goal, the available information and the risks involved. Researching a company or comparing a budgeting scenario gives students a reason to examine those inputs before reaching a conclusion. Calculations make the effect of a fee, a time period or a changing assumption easier to see.
Tracking a hypothetical portfolio also requires students to revisit their reasoning when results differ from expectations. Explaining those results encourages them to distinguish an observed outcome from a forecast. These habits support careful comparisons, more precise questions and continued exploration of how people manage money.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 6th, 7th or 8th grade.
If you’re curious about how people choose investments or make decisions about money, this course offers concrete ways to investigate. Expect to read company information, work with numbers, compare ideas and explain your reasoning. Activities include a hypothetical stock portfolio, financial calculations and games about budgeting and credit. You may find some topics more interesting than others as you explore different parts of personal finance. The capstone gives you an opportunity to organize your research and communicate what you learned about your choices.
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive