My financial portfolio mainly consists of expired pizza coupons and a sense of mounting dread.

I’ve never understood finance. Whenever people start to talk about 401ks or Roth IRAs at the dinner table, my brain abruptly shuts down and only revives for the dessert course.

So I decided to learn how to manage my personal finances. And the way I started was with The Stock Market Game.

The Stock Market Game has a simple premise. It is a game about the stock market.

Ha! Only teasing. Really, it’s a ruthless battleground where people compete to see who can earn the most from their investments.

You get $10,000 to play with. Before you get too excited, it’s all fake cash. If there was real cash involved, I wouldn’t use it to play the stock market.

I’d invest in a horse. I like horses. I think they’re cute.

Thinking that impractical purchases are cute is the reason why I have only expired pizza coupons in my wallet instead of a fat stack of Benjamins.

So I went back to The Stock Market Game for the sake of my financial education.

I immediately decided to invest in Oreos, my favorite brand of cookie, only to realize that Oreos are not a publicly traded company.

They’re owned by Mondelez International, which also owns Chips Ahoy, Ritz, and Clif bars.

They say the strategy for making good investments is trusting your gut. My stomach wanted snacks, so I invested in Mondelez stock. And almost immediately, it fell.

Mondelez should’ve been happy to give a fraction of its company to a compulsive snacker like me. Instead, I get the sense they were depressed about the transaction.

Next I thought about my house. I live in a nice, middle-class home in suburban New Jersey. It made sense to invest in Berkshire Hathaway.

A single Berkshire Hathaway share costs over $700,000.

I think my entire family heard the sound of my jaw hitting my desk when I read that.

Even if my personal finances were measured in Monopoly money, I still wouldn’t have enough to buy shares of Warren Buffett’s company.

My final investment was in Apple. True, it was partially because I was still thinking of food. But it never hurts to invest when you’re hungry. Remember, trust your gut.

After spending (or blowing) my $10,000, I turned to the next stage in the game of life, or rather The Stock Market Game: waiting.

It turns out that the best investments are those that sit for 30 or 40 years.

I wasn’t about to wait that long, so I sold some shares and invested in penny stocks.

The premise was promising: buy something that’s worth a penny now, sell it when it’s worth a dollar later, and you’ll make 99 cents, easy.

What really happens is you buy a thousand shares of something for 30 cents per share, and it plummets to five cents per share, so you lose… well, a lot.

Don’t judge me. I’m not good at math.

The only thing I happen to be good at is eating Oreos, so that’s what I did after I tallied my losses in The Stock Market Game.

I ate a whole sleeve of cookies before I began to feel better. And at the end of the day, at least my Mondelez stock rose.

It may be that I contributed to it by buying Oreos, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is I learned a core principle of investing: get someone smart to do it for you.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.