The good news is kids at Ladue Middle School are learning how to invest in the stock market. The better news is that they aren't using real money.

Eleven-year-old Bill Kistner is on a five-member team that is participating in the internet-based Stock Market Game. The competition is operated by the Missouri Council of Economic Education, based at University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Kistner said his team decided, "if we're going to win the contest, we need to score big. Therefore, we decided to buy some risky stocks, in hopes of big gains the stock prices."

While many of the teams at Ladue Middle School have purchased well-known stocks, Kistner's team decided to "buy a lot of little stocks."

He added, "I'm sure I wouldn't be doing this type of investing if this was real money."

Fellow classmate Nicolas Nunn-Faron's team has taken a different approach. His team includes well-known big companies such as Coke, General Electric, Microsoft and Disney.

Eleven-year-old Nicolas' team feels that investments in big companies offer the best chance to "getting more money" from their investment. That's the same goal of Kistner's team although their approaches are just about opposite.

The current game competition started in February, when each team got an imaginary $100,000 pool of investment money. They have 10 weeks of investment time to see which team ends up with the most money when the contest ends late this month. (If you'd like to know more about the game, go to www.umkc.edu/mcee.)

The Stock Market Game holds two 10-week contests each school year. This is the first time math teacher Alice Nishiwaki has entered sixth grade teams in the 2001-2002 year.

However, several team members have had previous investment experience at school.

For instance, Kistner and 11-year-old Benjamin Young both participated in an enrichment program called Apogee, which had a stock market competition also.

Young said his team this semester is investing in "solid stocks" like Dell Computer, IBM and Pepsi. "We don't take risks," he added.

Dell and IBM are stocks he had in his Apogee investment portfolio. When the Stock Market Game started, Young's team picked Dell and IBM again.

"I made money with those stocks in Apogee. They were down when this game started so we bought them again," he said. "I didn't have Pepsi before but we saw it was down so we bought it," he added.

Twelve-year-olds Liz Eiger and Jordan Graham are on teams that have bought stocks that make products they like. Stock brokers often suggest investing in companies that make products you buy.

But, in this case, their investment in Krispie Kreme Doughnuts hasn't worked out.

Graham said, "I love Krispie Kreme doughnuts." And the stock of the fast-growing company had a big run up in price in previous months.

But, Eiger said, "It was doing well but it's now going down."

The game's 10-week time limit makes it hard to pick winners. Most stock brokers urge real-money investors to buy good stocks and keep them a long time.

For the kids at Ladue Middle, they don't have time for a stock to drop and then come back. Therefore, most of them try to pick stocks that might be historically low but have shown some recent strength.

Eiger said her team starts by picking companies whose price seems to be rising. "Then, we look at the 52-week range in prices to see if there is room for more growth," she said.

Graham said her team also has tried to predict when a stock that has increased in price might be ready to turn down. Her team faced that situation midway through the contest.

"We contemplated selling IBM because it had gone up so much," she said.

Teacher Nishiwaki said the Stock Market Game makes the kids more interested in math. "They'll ask me now to figure 2% of a number. If I tried to teach them percentages, they might not be interested.

"But, since they have to pay a 2% commission whenever they buy or sell a stock, they want to know how much money that is."