Seniors at 3 Athens schools to learn finance with $1,000 portfolios

ATHENS — Seniors in this city’s three public high schools will be taking a new subject this academic year: investing.

And while learning about the stock and bond markets, certificates of deposit, and bitcoin, they will be observing the real-time behavior of their individual $1,000 portfolios, given to them by the nonprofit Gifted Savings.

“One thousand dollars changes somebody’s life if given at the right time and place,” said Farhad Mohit, founder of Gifted Savings. “This is my way of addressing income disparity in this country. Money goes directly to the students.”

Mohit is a successful tech entrepreneur who founded Bizrate.com, Shopzilla and Flipagram, a music video app he sold to Chinese investors and eventually became TikTok.

The Athens program, covering roughly 800 students, is