With more than 3,500 students, Brockton High School is the biggest high school in Massachusetts, having become known in recent years for chronic understaffing. Mirroring the nickname of its sports teams, called the Boxers after famous alumni Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler, the school has also earned a reputation for bouts of student violence, including hallway fights.

But now a group of Brockton students is following in the footsteps of another famous alumnus — Keith Gill, a trader who played a pivotal role in the 2021 meme-stock explosion — and finding purpose and success in stock trading.

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Back in 2004, long before he earned notoriety under the monikers Roaring Kitty and DeepF—ingValue, Gill was himself a senior at Brockton High. Seventeen years later, Gill’s social-media-fueled exploits sent shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. AMC and GameStop Corp. GME skyrocketing, punishing the Wall Street hedge funds that had bet against them. Gill became a hero of the little-guy investor and landed before the House Committee on Financial Services, where he famously declared, “I am not a cat.” Gill inspired the Hollywood movie “Dumb Money,” then disappeared from public view for a few years before briefly returning to social media in 2024 to push meme stocks into the spotlight once again.

Current Brockton High School students have been building on Gill’s legacy with their own stock-picking prowess, creating a subculture at the school centered around learning about the stock market and investing. And last year, students from the school clinched the top five places in a nationwide stock-investing contest, winning a total of $15,000 in prize money in the form of an investment portfolio and scholarship funds.

Some 160 students across the country participated in the Financial Investment Club competition, which is sponsored by a nonprofit organization called the Base Chicago that works to help students in disadvantaged areas. A total of 22 Brockton High School students took part in the competition through Empower Yourself, a financial and STEM education program based in Brockton.

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“This is truly a big deal,” Kevin McCaskill, the principal of Brockton High School, told MarketWatch. “When students are exposed to programming like this, they can achieve anything.”

McCaskill acknowledged the challenges Brockton has faced in tackling the issue of student violence in recent years. About 15% of the population of Brockton, Mass., lives in poverty, well above the state average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The school community has come together to create systemic change in dealing with the violence problem, McCaskill told MarketWatch. “We’re redefining who we are as a school,” he said.

McCaskill, who has been the principal since January 2024, said that Cedric Turner, the founder and executive director of Empower Yourself, told him about Gill’s connection to the school. Empower Yourself has been operating within Brockton High School for several years, and it was Turner who invited the students to take part in the Financial Investment Club competition.

“I said to them: ‘Are you guys interested?’ ” Turner told MarketWatch. “Their response was, ‘Absolutely!’ ”

The students each received $1 million in mock money to trade over the course of nine months. They each created their own portfolio holding a minimum of 12 stocks. They had to own at least three stocks in three different S&P 500 SPX sectors and could invest no more than 15% of their total funds in a single stock.

Forget GameStop: Nvidia and Novo Nordisk were winnersBrockton High School is the largest high school in Massachusetts, and in New England. - Marc Vasconcellos

Like many investors, Henry Ani spent last year betting on the artificial-intelligence trend through chip maker Nvidia NVDA. At the time, Ani was a freshman at Brockton High School. He kept Nvidia in his virtual stock portfolio because of the company’s “significant growth” and because AI chips were cementing themselves as an essential part of the tech sector.

“AI chips were becoming increasingly more important,” Ani told MarketWatch. “Other chip makers in the industry would also try to replicate Nvidia with AI chips, so as an attempt to diversify my portfolio, I purchased shares of other similar [companies].”

Ani, who is now 16 and a sophomore, claimed the top spot in last year’s stock-picking competition.

In addition to technology, the high schooler also targeted the consumer-discretionary and healthcare sectors, taking positions in Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. CMG and Danish drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk DK:NOVO.B. “I purchased stock in these sectors because I had intent to diversify my portfolio, and generally companies in consumer discretionary see stability, low risk, and receive growth,” he told MarketWatch.

“My purchase of Novo Nordisk was due mainly to looking at the company’s involvement in obesity-combating drugs and viewing the company from the technical-analysis standpoint,” Ani added, citing the weight-loss drug Wegovy. “It was due to the need to diversify my portfolio and also wanting a stock that was gradually increasing.”

Tesla Inc. TSLA was initially in Ani’s portfolio, but he ultimately sold the shares. “I had Tesla at the beginning, but it was unstable, so I sold it,” he said. “I noticed through technical analysis Tesla had certain patterns that could result in growth, but due to the many actions taken by its CEO [Elon Musk], the general image of the company was disrupted, causing many to sell the company at unpredictable times when an event like this occurred.”

Ani told MarketWatch that he learned a lot about both investment strategy and patience during the competition. “I learned how to apply many concepts like qualitative, technical and quantitative analysis to choosing stocks,” he said. “I also learned how to hold, because, throughout the competition, I did not make many trades in comparison to my peers, and instead centered around holding.”

He also learned how hard it is to beat the stock market. Ani concluded that if possible, in pursuit of outperformance, it is “best to find the sector that can beat the market and focus on that,” he said. “Beating the market is also difficult because sometimes there is no sector that can beat the market, and focusing on individual stocks is the way, but focusing on individual stocks requires much further and in-depth analysis.”

From the archives (December 2024): Meme stocks were fueled by Roaring Kitty and ‘Trump trades’ this year. What can we expect in 2025?

Ani’s final return was about $1.46 million on the initial $1 million. At the end of the competition, his portfolio consisted of Nvidia, Novo Nordisk, Chipotle, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, GE Aerospace GE, GE Vernova Inc. GEV, Alphabet Inc. Class C GOOG, Intel Corp. INTC, Palo Alto Networks Inc. PANW and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSM.Brockton High School student Henry Ani clinched the top prize in a national stock-picking competition last year. - Brockton Public Schools

Ani is participating in the competition again this year and anticipates remaining engaged in investing for the rest of his life. “It will be important for me to invest throughout life, because investing not only helps people become more financially literate but also trains people in skills of risk management, educated guessing and many other skills that can be applied to many different aspects of life,” he said. “This year I have applied mostly the same strategy, but I also have bought index funds” that track baskets of stocks around, for example, an industry or regional theme.

For this year’s competition, Ani is betting on Nvidia again, convinced that continued AI spending will push the stock higher. Ani said that Gill, the meme-stock talisman, doesn’t come up during conversations with his fellow students about stocks or the competition. He is well aware of the Roaring Kitty story, but he’s taking his own approach to the market. “I feel that I am following my own path,” he said.

Related: Why Roaring Kitty is a GameStop ‘true believer’

Kim Redding, the former CEO of Brookfield Investment Management, the public securities group of investment giant Brookfield Asset Management, volunteered with the Brockton students during last year’s competition. Redding taught the students about financial concepts, including esoteric ones like pegged exchange rates. “We teach through the summer, then in the school year we have a Zoom call on the first Sunday of the month,” he told MarketWatch. “We bring in speakers from investment banks to talk about AI or whatever.”

The Brockton students also attended trading classes at the Hughey Center for Financial Services at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

This year the Financial Investment Club competition has expanded to include middle-school students and has grown from Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles to include students from New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Nearly 200 students are taking part this year, Redding told MarketWatch.

But the new competitors will have to best the students from Brockton, who are highly motivated, according to Redding. Last year they reached out to him about six times outside of lessons and Zoom calls, he said.

“I have [heard] stories that they are talking [about the stock market] down the [school] hall — they are talking about it throughout the day,” he said. “We can’t teach them everything to become a professional investor, but we can give them the seed, that spark that lights them up.”

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