All the pre-meeting boxes had been checked in the moments prior to the recent gathering of Herriman High School’s “Girls Investing Club.”

• Engaging digital finance-presentation slides were all prepared and uploaded. Check.
• The club’s three student organizers — each donning “Girls Investing Club” T-shirts — stood smiling and ready to welcome their fellow students and guest speaker for the club’s October meeting. Check.
• And dozens of donated Crumble cookies were fanned out across a classroom folding table, just for added enticement. And, check.

But would students show up?

It was a fair question.

After all, the first-year club was meeting on a Friday afternoon after the end of a Herriman High school week.

Now the weekend was calling. Would high school girls (and a few boys) really want to hang around campus for an extra hour to talk stock trading, Roth IRA contributions, compound interest and entrepreneurship?

The answer: An emphatic “Yes”.

By the time Herriman High School’s Girls Investing Club leaders called their October meeting to order, the classroom was packed. And when all the seats were filled, the remaining students simply plopped down on the floor.

“Thank you so much for joining our meeting today,” said high school senior and club co-founder Kaylee Arsenault, greeting her fellow club members. “Today’s theme will focus on stocks and the stock market.”

An alliance of finance-minded girls

The genesis of the Herriman High School’s Girls Investing Club was sparked last spring when Arsenault and her friend Lizzie Anderson were participating in an international conference for Distributive Education Clubs of America — aka DECA, a nonprofit organization that prepares students for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality and management.

The then-high school juniors fell short in their bid at the conference to win an international DECA business competition — but they were already setting their sights on winning it their senior year.

The girls knew that in order to be competitive for the international DECA contest, they needed to find, in Anderson’s words, “A ‘fire’ project to win.”

So they began searching for a business-related need within their own community.

“We learned that there’s a major lack of finance knowledge among women — along with a lack of women in finance professions and a lack of women participating in investing,” said Anderson.

The imbalance in women participating in finance and investing with confidence became even more frustrating for the Herriman students after discovering research that revealed women actually perform better than their male counterparts when investing in the stock market.

Anderson, Arsenault and junior classmate Baylee Zuniga — with the support of their business teacher/DECA adviser Randall Kammerman — began forming an investor initiative project designed to educate and empower women in areas of finance and investment.

Their first task was to organize an investing club for girls at Herriman High.

Mission accomplished.

Herriman’s Girls Investing Club was up and running by the start of the 2024-2025 school year.

“And now we also hope (to take the investing initiative) to middle schools and other high schools, and then across the community,” said Anderson.

The investing club leaders have even reached out to local women’s shelters and the Salt Lake City YWCA.

“We’ve already found interest in us coming and doing workshops to teach women in our community about how to invest and also how to prepare for finance-based professions,” added Anderson.

In its maiden year at Herriman, the Girls Investing Club has over 100 members.

Club organizers Anderson, Arsenault and Zuniga are also demonstrating an advanced grasp of the power of networking.

They have already connected with several folks in the local business community to secure sponsorships for their investing initiative — while simultaneously curating a pool of guest speakers for the club gatherings.

Anderson and her fellow student leaders are also developing another essential skill in navigating the turbulence of finance and investing: Resilience.

“We’ve had a lot of success with this club, but we’ve also had our fair share of challenges with, say, people not responding to us or initially struggling to get our club approved,” she said. “So we’ve learned about persistence and the importance of working with teammates.”

Kammerman, meanwhile, marvels at the capacity and “get-it-done” grit of his young students.

“I’ve taught here at Herriman for 13 years, but this is the first year we’ve done this club because we’ve never had a group of girls like this who just saw a need — and then wanted to do this awesome thing,” he said.

“I love teaching finance, so when these students said they wanted to start the ‘Girls Investing Club’, I just said, ‘Let’s do it’.”

Women making leaps in stock market activity

Herriman High’s Girls Investing Club reflects national trends that women of all ages are making strides in their investing confidence and savvy.

More women are taking ownership of their finances and investing than ever before.

According to recent research from Fidelity Investment’s 2024 Women & Investing Study, 7 in 10 women own investments in the stock market — an 18% increase compared to 2023.

While younger generations continue to invest in higher numbers, the percentage of Gen X and Boomer women who invest in the stock market jumped the most year-over-year, increasing 18% and 23%, respectively.

“It’s encouraging to see the number of women taking control of their finances swell over the past three years,” said Sangeeta Moorjani, head of tax exempt market and lifetime engagement for Fidelity Investments.

“We know there is still work to be done — the financial confidence gap continues to persist, and women continue to report higher levels of financial stress than men — but we’ve made considerable strides.”

After-school “running with the bulls”

The first half of October’s Girls Investing Club meeting focused on the stock markets.

But instead of simply lecturing the club members on the ins-and-outs of, say, the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq Composite, the three student leaders — Anderson, Arsenault and Zuniga — “hired” each club member to become virtual stock market investors.

Utilizing the popular MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange — “Run with the Bulls, Without the Risk!” — the Herriman students each opened-up their own simulated investing accounts on their phones or laptops.

Within seconds, they were analyzing market trends and searching for well-known publicly traded companies such as Nike and Netflix — and then making initial virtual investments utilizing $100K in, well, play money.

Over the course of the 2024-2025 school year, Herriman’s club members will compete for “Top Investor” spots atop the club’s MarketWatch leaderboard.

At year’s end, the top three performers will walk away, literally, with prized dividends — a pair of trendy new sneakers.

Even while feeling the combined rush of market investing and sugary Crumbl cookies, the club turned its collective attention to October’s guest speaker, Vincenza Vicari-Bentley.

An accredited financial counselor and the coordinator of Utah State University Extension’s Empowering Financial Wellness Program, Vicari-Bentley spent 30 minutes interacting with club members on financial topics such as the power of long-term investing, leveraging compound interest, taxes and budgeting, outpacing inflation and wisely utilizing finance-related social media.

“I think it’s super cool that all of you are here at this stage of your life and age,” said Vicari-Bentley. “I wish this was something that I would have been thinking about or had been interested in years ago, because I would have been that much further ahead.

“So good on you for being here and being open to learning about this stuff… It’s empowering.”

An investing community for all girls

Herriman sophomore Bryanna Nickerson is quick to admit she’s not generally interested in money matters.

Still, she’s proud to be a member of her school’s charter investing club designed especially for girls.

“I’m hoping that this club can help me realize that I’m going to need to deal with money in my life, and that there are ways to do that,” she said. “So I’m really glad that I signed up for the club because it’s a learning opportunity — and there are good snacks.”

When Herriman’s club gathers once again in November and beyond, it will be saving a seat — and a cookie — for Nickerson and scores of other girls.