Hewlett's Joshua Sepe wins yet again

Hewlett High School senior Joshua Sepe was victorious in the New York Stock Market Fall competition, winning over 5,000 participants across the state.

The win marks Sepe’s second time winning the competition, after winning in the spring as a junior last school year.

Sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Foundation, the competition offers students interested in stocks the opportunity to learn how to invest and grow a $100,000 nest egg.

The competition began on Oct. 15 and ended two months later, with Sepe using most of the same strategies he used in the spring but also implementing new strategies he learned along the way, he said.

“I used a lot more patterns such as engulfing and tweezers,” he said. “I also started using breakout and retest of different chart patterns as well to help use a different strategy to up my game.”

Each technical analysis strategy helped Sepe to enhance his approach to stock trading allowing him to make more informed decisions about buying or selling stocks.

“Most of these moves are all based on the chart patterns themselves,” he said.

He competed in the competition through the high school’s Stock Market Club. Identical to the spring, he had the option to compete as a team or individually. He competed on his own.

Sepe said that it gets complicated working with multiple people who have different opinions.

“A lot of the people in the club talk about the base stocks like Tesla or Apple,” he said. “I look at all the stocks, such as Biotech, all these risky low stocks that would actually make me a lot of profits to win the game.”

Sepe admits, though, that he did not have a good start at the beginning of the game, having a significant loss on his second trade, down by $20,000, but he didn’t let the loss ruin his confidence.

“You have to just put it in the past,” Sepe articulated. “In that situation, that kind of distraction I let it get away from me and I do really focus on that, hoping that it would go back, which is a mental thing that I keep working on.

That’s my strategy, stick to it and hopefully we’ll keep playing out, and it did,” he added.

Jared Pittelli, the club’s adviser, has known Sepe for two years and has enjoyed working with him, seeing him grow from when he first met him to now.

“He spends time teaching other members of the club at the beginning of each meeting to share his knowledge,” Pittelli wrote in an email. “The growth for Josh was mainly in his account balance! As a mentor, I really enjoy working with him. I have learned a ton from working with him.”

Sepe has committed to Fairfield University in Connecticut. He was accepted into the Dolan School of Business.

But before Sepe leaves for college, he plans to go for the three-peat, competing once again in the spring competition.