Henry Stein has some weighty academic interests. The Huntington High School sophomore spent the past year studying the effects of social media and the news on the stock prices of big business.
Huntington High School sophomore Henry Stein
Mr. Stein has conducted his analysis as a student in the high school’s science research program. The program’s name can be deceiving. Participants do not have to choose a strictly “scientific” topic, such as a lab study. Instead, they can engage in other types of research, but apply scientific principles of analysis to their findings.
Mr. Stein is a member of Huntington’s Key Club and Habitat for Humanity chapters and he’s a top student academically.
“The stock market is a place where anyone can buy and sell shares of stock from a public company,” according to an abstract of Mr. Stein’s project. “The stock market can also be affected very easily based on outside events that can involve the business itself, an item the business is selling or something negative or positive that has happened that impacts the stock’s performance and share price.”
Mr. Stein enjoys playing basketball, working out, reading and playing video games in his spare time. But during school hours and in his classes, he’s all business.
“A share of stock is the smallest percentage of stock that one can buy,” states Mr. Stein’s project abstract. “A person can buy as many shares of stock as they want, but with each share bought, the stock price increases. This experiment evaluates the stock price of five companies every day and the results are averaged together every week for a little longer than a month. With this information, the predicted solution should be that social media and the news will affect how well a stock performs for a business. More specifically if the stock performs well, it is more likely that the business was reflected positively and if the stock performs poorly, the business most likely did something that caused the news to create a negative reflection on the business.”
The current stock market instability in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic will provide the basis for plenty of research now and in future years.
(Huntington senior Robert Jean-Gilles contributed reporting to this story.)