I’m afraid this is out of your influence, sir. The rogue scoundrel named, what was it, Dave? He has ownership of 99.9% of Smogon’s assets.
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Smogoff is for sale
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
why does he look like hes taking a really big shit
some people shit, Aqua’s Jet…?
A Big Mac, probably
Don't mean to brag, but I had an assignment about stocks in middle school. So I'm pretty experienced with this kinda stuff if I do say so myself.
if i were in charge of the public school system i'd divert all funding for textbooks for students and just give them a robinhood account with equivalent value. now that's what i call an economic stimulus package
rodrigo duterte.
Funny story about public schools, stocks, and such
When I was in high school one of my teachers gathered a group of five of us from my econ class to participate in what she described as a “stock market game” where teams from all over the United States/some even from outside the country would compete. She gave us no further context so we entered and figured the goal was to just try and make the most money as possible. The only other thing we really heard about the competition was that there were cash prizes for “the top five teams,” so again we figured that meant just making the most money. So our strategy was basically, “fuck it, go big or go home.”
We did some digging and found a pharma stock named Zogenix that had historically took off right around when the competition was taking place and then would fall back to earth shortly after. I forget exactly what medicines they made, but some were opioids. Idk really. But we were given a fake $100,000 to play with and basically just dumped all the money in this really volatile stock. Turns out that Zogenix did what it historically did and rose a lot right after we bought it. We bought low, waited it out for a little bit and then sold high, pretty much right before it came back down. We had pretty much double the money of the second place team at that point with only a few weeks left in the competition, so our plan was to just hold our money the rest of the way and take first prize.
However.
With like two weeks left to go in the competition our teacher that brought us together did a check-in with how we were doing and was like “Oops I forgot to give you the full context of the game.” Apparently it wasn’t a game at all, it was a scenario-based thing. The scenario was that we were supposed to act as if we were wealth managers for this guy who was giving us $100,000 as a trial run, and if we did well, he would give us control of his multi-million dollar portfolio. Still not a huge deal, we thought. It’s still fake money and we’re coming in first place by a landslide so we’re going to get that cash prize.
Not necessarily.
This is when our teacher also told us that we were supposed to be writing up reports along the way, which were to be submitted to the people running the scenario at the end. Only then would the people running the scenario select the top 10 teams (not necessarily the ten that made the most money) to then present for them and award the cash prizes based off the presentations. Oh, and the people running the scenario were from UPenn’s Wharton School of Business, so it was like an actual, serious thing. So, me and my group got to work.
The amount of bullshit that went into the weekly reports that we crammed to get done was insane. To this day, I can’t think of an assignment/anything where I/my group just straight up lied about what we did. We really tried to convince these people that what we did was smart money management and that it fit the scenario, not us just saying “fuck it we ball” with some fake money. And you know what? After all that bullshitting, we were still the top team in money made by a large amount, which is I think why we still actually got invited to the finals at Wharton lmao.
Fast forward a few weeks and it’s presentation time. We’re all wearing suits and ready to go. We only had to drive like an hour and a half to get there but when I said this was a serious competition I meant it. There was a team that flew in from California. There were two teams that flew in from India. And we felt like such imposters but hey, we made it there. I still remember we were signing in one of the people made the comment that oh, we were the team that had made the most money. Clearly our BS had made it this far. Hopefully it would carry us to one of the top five places for a cash prize.
…our presentation didn’t go as planned though.
The presentation was mostly a blur, I forget exactly what I talked about and what three of my other group members talked about. But we had one dude who got super nervous and completely went off script/off the rails. During his section, one of the topics that he had to cover was Ethics, which was one of the major categories that we were scored on. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget him blurting out, “And you know, Zogenix is a company that makes opioids. And with those being really addictive, that’s only beneficial for us.”
…
There was a long, awkward pause. You could hear a pin drop after that. You could almost see all the judges immediately draw a big fat zero on the ethics section of the scorecard. I even remember one of the kids from the California group nervously cough to break the silence. It was at that point that the facade was broken and no one was taking us for real anymore. Even though we were the top moneymakers in the scenario we ended up not winning one of the top five cash prizes. It was a big disappointment but looking back on it, we didn’t really deserve to be there anyway.
So yeah, it was kind of a dud of a day. Still a funny story I guess. The only other really notable thing that happened is that our teacher was an absolutely terrible driver and almost hit a pedestrian twice. I always made fun of her for that but as we know, that would sort of come back to bite me years later. At the end of the day though, I was just happy that we got a day off from school for the whole thing, even if we didn’t win any cash.