Eagle Era

AHS-based finance team wins bronze in a global competition

By Keithav Sivashanker

Students from AHS gained recognition after the Money Mantra team advanced to the semifinals of the Wharton Global High School Investment Competition, becoming the only team from the Bay Area to reach this stage of the competition.

The competition was hosted by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania through the Wharton Global Youth Program. It challenges high school students to develop long-term investment strategies using real-world market data. 

The team’s interest in finance and investment research pushed them to participate. Team member Vebhav Thilak (11) said, “What stood out to us was that it wasn’t all just theory; there was a practical aspect to it as well which made it much more challenging.” 

Students on the team joined to test their knowledge in the world of finance. “We wanted to see if the work we had been doing in finance and data science could actually hold up in a competitive setting,” said Thilak. “Knowing that real, professional asset managers would be judging our strategy made us take the entire process much more seriously.” 

The team delegated their workload among all of the members so that they could work efficiently. “We split responsibilities based on what each of us was strongest at,” said team leader Ahan Panyam (11). “Some of us focused on research and investment analysis while others worked on organizing the presentation and communicating the strategy clearly.” 

Panyam led the technical development of the investment strategy. “I worked on designing the models, writing the code, and building the framework that our strategy was based on,” he said.

The team faced many challenges during the process. “Preparation wasn’t easy; we spent hundreds of hours working on this over the course of the year,” said Thilak. “A lot of the work happened after school or late at night when we were refining our analysis or adjusting parts of the strategy.” 

According to the students, one of the biggest challenges was communicating their strategy clearly. “Some of the analysis we were doing was pretty technical,” said Panyam. “One of the hardest parts was figuring out how to explain it clearly without losing the depth of the work.” 

The team’s overall objective was more than just to compete. “Our goal wasn’t just to participate,” said Panyam. “We wanted to show that a data-driven and algorithmic approach to investing could actually work.” 

[Left to right] Somil Sarode (11), Anika Panyam (11), Ahan Panyam (11), Vebhav Thilak (11), and Dhyutidar Saravanakumar (11) participated in the competition (Photo Credit: Vebhav Thilak (11)).

The competition attracted teams from around the world. According to the Wharton Global Youth Program website, more than 2,300 final investment reports were submitted, with only 50 teams selected as semifinalists by judges from Aberdeen Investments. “It is amazing to see 13 different countries represented among the 2025-2026 Top 50 teams, reflecting Wharton’s global reach,” said Serguei Netessine, Senior Vice Dean for Innovation and Global Initiatives at Wharton. “It’s truly amazing to see the dedication of high school students around the world learning and growing through business and finance education.” 

 The students were shocked when they found out they qualified for semifinals. “We didn’t expect it, but we were definitely hoping for it,” said Thilak. “We had put so much time into it that it was really satisfying to see it pay off.”

This achievement placed Money Mantra among the top 0.7% of competitors worldwide, a big accomplishment for AHS’s small team. “For us, it shows that students here can compete with teams from anywhere in the world,” said Thilak. “We’re proud to represent our school and our community on that level.”