Hey all, Dylan here. This is the last blog post of the year for me! Today I’ll be reflecting on our latest projects and on our spring exhibition.

In out last projects, we learned about the stock market and financial literacy. We did a stock market simulation in which we were given $13,000 in fake money to invest into whatever stocks we wanted to and the winner of the contest was promised a $20 gift card to a store of their choosing. For me, I invested mainly in arms and defence companies, such as Sig Sauer, Boeing, BAE systems, Smith & Wesson, Lockheed Martin, and some other companies. My reasoning for this was that with the current war in Ukraine, these companies are selling major amounts of weapons and defence equipment to the US government and other governments around the world, who are buying these stockpiles of munitions and arms and donating them to Ukraine to fend off the Russian invasion. On top of this, in Canada and the USA, there is talk of tightening gun laws, meaning that most gun owners would want to stockpile and add to their collection before the purchase of such items was made illegal, meaning an uptick in the purchase of the products these companies produce. I also invested in some other companies such as Tesla and Meta, but my gains in those companies were negligible. On the other hand, the amount of money I made by investing in those defence companies was very large. I bought at a low for Smith & Wesson and Vista Outdoors, and actually sold at a loss for Vista Outdoors, but Smith & Wesson alone made me almost $1,000 in the month that I held the stock for. My other stocks, including S&W, made me a total of over $8,000, proving my hypothesis correct. Over the course of this project, Bill C-21, a Canadian proposition to make amendments to the Criminal Code and change the definition of a Firearm in the criminal code, which would ban many different models of guns from being purchased in Canada, passed the House of Commons, which was a bit of a shock for Canadian gun owners and collectors. After news of the bill passing through the House of Commons broke, I waited a few days, and when the stock went up as I predicted, I then sold all my holdings in S&W and Sig Sauer, which made me the bulk of my money in this project.

My idea was that since a lot of the gun owners in Canada are Right-Wing learning on the political scale, they would want to purchase more firearms if the bill was going to go through, preventing them from doing so in the future. There has been a history of Canadian firearm owners buying large amounts of weapons between the time that a ban was announced and the ban being finalized, such as when the freeze on handgun sales was announced. Many people bought handguns who wouldn’t usually be going and buying them, knowing they would soon not be able to buy them ever, and then the ban went through, which halted the sale of handguns. My thinking was the same here, because I knew that C-21 was close to passing through the House of Commons, and that it would likely do so. This would be a shock to many Canadian gun owners, and if they followed the path that I observed they had in the past, they would be buying more guns which would be good for the holdings in the companies that manufactured the guns. The bill passing the House of Commons just means it’s closer to becoming official, meaning that people would be incentivized to buy buy buy before they ran out of time. I was right, and after the bill passed the House of Commons, the stocks went up just a little bit (I had a large amount of holdings in all the stocks, so a little bit was enough for me), and I sold the stocks before they went back down in the following weeks. In total, my stocks made me just over $8,000 of fake money, which is pretty cool!

In our other classes, we focused on making podcasts, which was super fun. I named mine “Unravelling the Unsettling”, and you can listen to it here. In our Spring Exhibition, we showed off all of our podcasts. The exhibition was a major success. We made business cards for our podcasts and learned to market ourselves efficiently and effectively. At the exhibition was where this marketing took place. We previewed our podcasts to all the visitors and handed out our business cards.

Here’s my podcast art:

 

I did art for each episode, just to add some creativity into my telling of stories that weren’t mine. My podcast is pretty self explanatory, and I was covering creepy and unexplainable phenomenon and stories.

Here’s my business card:

Front

Back

Anyways, that’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed all 840 words of my blog post and I’ll see you next year.

Bye!

-Dylan