About 20 years ago, businessman Mike Weaver donated a fund to the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNCG.

The purpose of the $10,000 gift was to give students in the business school the opportunity to invest real money. Well, that’s what the students in the MBA program have done and, over 20 years, they’ve turned $10,000 into more than $141,000.

The Weaver Fund is a student-directed portfolio that is invested by students in three MBA classes at the Bryan School. As part of their class experience, students learn to critically analyze companies and their stocks for investment.

“Essentially, this is a student-directed portfolio in all ways,” said Dr. Tony Wingler, the professor in the Department of Business Administration who oversees the Weaver Fund. “Students get in smaller groups and work on recommendations based on an analysis they’ve done on a particular company or corporation. They make a recommendation to the class as a whole and then the class votes on it. I think these MBA students have really demonstrated their ability to make good decisions. We’ve had a long line of responsible students who have just handled the fund very, very well.”

The normal compounded rate of return on most stock portfolios is about 8 percent per year; the students manage a 14 percent rate of return on the fund that is entirely invested in equities.

That doesn’t mean the fund has always been successful. Like many investors, the portfolio took a hit in the late 1990s when the stock market shuddered and the dot com bubble burst. The fund, then at $160,000, lost 25 percent of its value. That’s a hard, but realistic lesson to learn, Wingler said, but students have since made significant inroads to regaining those losses, bringing the fund up $20,000 in the subsequent years.

But the money isn’t the point, Wingler said.

“The primary objective is to create a special educational experience managing money,” he said. “I think it has been extremely successful in that sense. I’ve worked both ways. I’ve had classes where you simulate investments without funding. The fact that they are dealing with real money heightens the seriousness and makes them, frankly, more interested. The realism that money adds to the class is something that is impossible to have without the money. There have been 20 years of students benefiting from this.”

Wingler said, at last count, UNCG was one of only 150 schools across the nation to offer students the opportunity to manage a real-money portfolio.