The 3-year-old student-run Finance and Investment Club is preparing for another semester-long Vermont Showdown following two wins and last year’s near-extinction due to declining interest.

The Vermont Showdown is an online competition where finance squads at Johnson, Lyndon, Castleton, Champlain, and St. Michael’s start out with $100,000 and they invest in different companies as a group and see who makes the most money, with fake money of course.  This competition lasts a semester.

In 2010, Associate Professor of Business and Economics Henrqiue Cezar and then-JSC student Nick Holmes started the club, both wanting to provide an experience that would teach the methods of investing to business and non business majors alike.

With seven members initially, the club won the Vermont Showdown in its first year.

Despite two very good initial years, the club nearly shut down last year, lacking a president.

Eventually Holmes approach the current president, Joel Carr, asking that the club be salvaged, something Carr wanted as well.

Carr joined the club last year, mostly out of curiosity.  “I was looking to learn more about investing,” he said.  He soon caught the finance bug and became president so “people behind me will also have that knowledge too,”  he said.

Carr also cited the lack of money management classes available at school as a reason to keep the club going.  It could, he said, provide an alternative to a formal money management class.

Unlike last year, Carr believes there is a committed group of students in the club with regularly scheduled Monday meetings in the Martinetti HTML lab to study and practice their investment strategies.

They also use Mondays for preparing for the Vermont Showdown by playing parts in group investment games.

The club’s president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer are all seniors, however, and unless new members come forward, it may slide towards closure again.

However, Cezar, the club’s adviser, feels the club is regaining its footing after last year’s rocky time. “It’s getting there,.” he says. “What’s lacking is more interaction with other clubs, more interactions with the community.”