Classroom Ideas: Teaching Economics and Business with the Student Investor Challenge

TL;DR: Five classroom activities — company research day, a weekly news-to-price tracker, an Active vs Strategic diversification debate, a Windfall Tax case study, and an end-of-round presentation — turn the Student Investor Challenge into a term-long economics and business unit. The guiding principle throughout: grade the reasoning behind a decision, not the percentage return it happened to produce.

Why a live £100,000 portfolio teaches more than a textbook chart

A textbook case study is fixed the moment it is printed. A team’s Student Investor portfolio is not — it moves on real London Stock Exchange prices, it can go wrong in ways nobody planned for, and it sits in a live league table against hundreds of other schools. That combination of real stakes and real uncertainty is exactly what makes a lesson stick. Students are not analysing a company they will never meet again; they are managing money they put in themselves, and defending decisions they will have to answer for next week when the price has moved.

The rest of this guide assumes your team is already registered and trading. If registration is still ahead of you, the mechanics referenced here are documented in full on the rules and portfolio page.

There is a practical classroom benefit too: because the portfolio is live, you never run out of fresh material. A textbook case study gets stale after the third time you teach it, but a real portfolio generates a new decision point most weeks — a price move, a news story, a tax deduction, a league table shift — without you having to design a new scenario each time.

Map the challenge’s stages to your scheme of work

Round one — two portfolios as a live case study in company finance

Every team runs two portfolios from day one of round one, each starting with a virtual £100,000, and each built to teach something different. The difference between the Active and Strategic portfolios is not just a rule to memorise — it is a ready-made case study in time horizon and risk. Set the class the task of explaining, in their own words, why a company that looks attractive for a daily Active trade might be a poor fit for the monthly-limited Strategic book, or vice versa.

The Windfall Tax as a ready-made opportunity-cost lesson

Both portfolios apply the same rule: cash sitting above £15,000 in either book is taxed daily. It is one of the clearest, most concrete illustrations of opportunity cost available to a school-age audience, and it is explained at length in the Windfall Tax and idle cash. When a team’s score dips overnight because they were sitting on cash to protect a lead, that lesson does not need explaining twice.

Semi-final price predictions as a forecasting exercise

Teams who progress spend four weeks predicting Friday closing prices for a set of assets, with points awarded for accuracy and for how long a prediction is held before the market closes on the Friday. A team’s final score counts only their best three weeks out of four — the full mechanic is on the rules page. Even outside the semi-final itself, the format works as a standalone weekly forecasting exercise: ask students to predict a price on Monday, hold the prediction, and mark themselves against the actual close.

Five lesson ideas you can run this term

1. Company research day. Give each student one existing holding in the team’s portfolio and ten minutes to find one fact that would change how they feel about it — a recent earnings release, a competitor announcement, a change in interest rates. Each student presents their holding to the group and argues whether it should stay, grow, or go.
2. Weekly news-to-price tracker. Keep a simple running journal, one entry per week: what moved the portfolio, what news (if any) explains it, and what the team decided to do about it. Over a term this becomes a genuinely useful revision resource, and it forces students to separate noise from signal.
3. Diversification debate — Active vs Strategic team strategy. Split the class into two sides and have them argue for concentrating effort on the Active portfolio versus the Strategic one. The debate only works if both sides have to defend their choice with the actual rules — trade limits, the £15,000 cash threshold, time horizon — rather than gut feeling.
4. Windfall Tax case study. Pull the team’s own cash balance history and calculate, as a class, how much tax was paid to idle cash over a given month. Then ask: what could that money have earned if it had been deployed instead? This is opportunity cost taught with the team’s own numbers, not a hypothetical one.
5. End-of-round presentation as assessment. At the close of round one, have the team present their portfolio’s story to the class or a parallel form group: what they held, what they changed, what they got wrong, and what they would do differently. Treat this as the assessed piece for the unit — it rewards the process, not the final score.

Grade the reasoning, not the return

The single most useful principle to carry through every one of these activities: mark the quality of the decision, not the size of the gain or loss it produced. Markets are noisy over short periods, so a well-reasoned trade can still lose money, and a lucky guess can still make it. A student who researched a holding, weighed the risk, and was wrong has learned more than one who guessed right without understanding why. Build your assessment criteria — whether informal class feedback or a graded presentation — around the reasoning a team can show, not the number on the league table in any given week.

In practice this can be as simple as a two-question prompt attached to any trade: what did you expect to happen, and why did you expect it? A team that can answer both, even when the trade loses money, is doing exactly what the challenge is designed to teach. A team that cannot answer either, even when the trade happens to win, is the one that needs your attention.

Getting your class registered

If your school has not yet entered, registration and the Teacher Reference Number you will need are covered step by step in the complete guide for teachers. For a lighter first-week walkthrough once your team is live, see the getting started guide.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a finance background to run these lessons?

No. Every activity above works from the same starting point as your students — you are guiding a discussion about a live portfolio, not delivering a finance lecture. The challenge’s own mechanics do the technical heavy lifting.

Which subjects does this fit — Economics, Business, or Maths?

All three, plus PSHE and Citizenship for the financial literacy angle. Economics and Business teachers get the most direct fit — opportunity cost, diversification, company research — while Maths teachers can lean on the percentage gains, compound growth and probability built into the league tables.

How much class time does each activity need?

Most of the five ideas fit inside a 15 to 20 minute slot within a lesson you are already running. The end-of-round presentation is the exception — treat that as a full lesson or a homework task built up over a week.

Can I use these ideas before my team has even registered?

The company research day and the diversification debate work as stand-alone lessons even before you have a live portfolio. The weekly tracker, the Windfall Tax case study and the presentation all need an active team, so save those until after registration.

For further reading on classroom simulations more broadly, see the Economics Network’s collection of classroom games and simulations and MoneyInstructor’s stock market simulation lesson plan, which shaped some of the thinking behind the “grade the reasoning” approach above.