A medical cannabis stock selection was one of the reasons why Warwick Academy’s StockClimbers outshone 19 other teams to win $10,000 by finishing top in the KPMG Senior School Investment Challenge.

The students in the team turned $100,000 into $119,651 in six months by skilfully buying and selling stocks. The money was imaginary, but the experience was very real and the team learnt a lot about investing and how the stock markets work, according to captain Nathan Bothello.

“I never really knew what stocks were before this experience. Now, after doing this, I definitely will invest,” he said.

“There were a lot of teamwork skills that I learnt from it. It was a good experience overall.”

He said all members of the team came up with suggestions for picks to include in the virtual portfolio.

“We would look and see which [stocks] were in the news, then check on their website and then invest.”

Among the big winners for the team was Cronos Group.

Nathan said: “We were investing in medical marijuana stocks and they worked very well for us; there was one in particular called Cronos, and it got a 12 per cent return.”

There are 20 school teams competing in the challenge, and each has been given an imaginary $100,000 to invest in the stock market. The top-three teams won cash prizes for their school, to be used for educational initiatives.

The second-placed team was Mount Saint Agnes’s Neritic, which won $6,000, while third-placed team was CedarBridge Academy’s Money Makers21, which won $4,000.

Eleven of the teams had a portfolio profit at the end of the contest. The competition has been run for 14 years, and this year included a near record 100 students split between the 20 teams.

The results were announced by Steve Woodward, managing director, senior lead of KPMG Enterprise, in Bermuda, at a prize-giving event in City Hall.

He told The Royal Gazette: “The idea is to get kids interested in investing in capital markets and hopefully allow them to find out more about the industry, and maybe start thinking about a career.

“We also like to get them thinking about KPMG as well, because we like to attract students to us at an early age. We have a work-shadow programme for children of this age, and that leads into our internship programmes, and we also run two KPMG scholarships, one for accounting students and one for non-accounting students. The deadline for that closes at the end of May.

“We hope some of these students will consider applying for the KPMG scholarships as well, and maybe have a longer-term career with us.”