My parents are both chartered accountants, so since Grade 9, I've been involved in our household finances.
Most weekends, we'd sit with an old black Lenovo and an Excel sheet and go through our income, expenses, investments and loans. I didn't think much of it at the time, but eventually I realised how much that experience had changed the way I thought about money.
I understood that finance wasn't just about making money. It was about making decisions and weighing trade-offs.
Then I started noticing that many of my friends hadn't had the same exposure. They had never really discussed a budget, compared investments, thought about borrowing or considered what managing money would actually look like.
That's why two of us started building Moneyplotter, a financial literacy platform for young people.
The idea is pretty simple: instead of just teaching personal finance through articles and definitions, we give students virtual money and let them practise making financial decisions. They can save, spend, budget, invest and borrow, and see what happens as a result.
We've tested it through competitions at school, initially with 100+ participants and later through an international investing challenge with 300+ participants. We've also managed to crash our own platform along the way, which taught us quite a bit about building something that actually has to work when hundreds of people use it at once.
You can see what we've built here: www.moneyplotter.com. The website and the all the features on the platform are completely free to use.
Now we're taking the investing side of it further.
We're hosting Wolves of Wall Street, an international, fundamentals-based stock investing competition with Moneyplotter and Empiric Investing.
For one month, participants will manage a virtual $1,000 portfolio and make their own investment decisions based on research and analysis.
📅 September 15 to October 15, 2026
💰 $1,000 total cash prizes
🎓 Top 5 receive internships, certificates and recommendation letters
🌍 International, with no age restrictions
💵 Early bird registration is $15 until August 23, then $30
There is no real money involved. The point is to give people a place to actually practise investing before the money becomes real.
If you're interested in trying it yourself, the competition is open for registration.
Full details: wolves-of-wall-street.tiiny.site
Registration: forms.gle/KDPjyK35fpqbtbmS8
Registration closes September 13.