Like many young boys growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Lou Graham had a paper route. But unlike many other youngsters, he didn’t spend all of his money on soft drinks, candy and comic books.

“I started investing when I was 14 with paper route money,” says Graham, a Little Rockbased financial adviser who serves on the board of Economics Arkansas, a nonprofit organization that promotes economic literacy in Arkansas schools. “And the reason I did this was that I watched my dad look at the stock pages, and it fascinated me.”

His father, Dr. Grimsley Graham, a well-known Little Rock physician and surgeon, was an avid investor in the days of the “Nifty 50” stocks in the 1960s and ’70s, which included such “blue-chip” companies as General Electric, Coca-Cola, Xerox and IBM. Graham recalls that one of the stocks his father chose was Xerox, which turned out to be “absolutely meteoric.” Following in his father’s footsteps, young Graham’s first stock pick was a company called Ampex. Although it wasn’t meteoric like Xerox, it remains in his portfolio.

“I still own the shares,” says Graham, who is now 70. “They’ve been merged. … But I have the original certificates in a frame in my house.”

His passion for investing was such that when his father gave him and his brothers some money when they turned 18, he invested his. “The brothers’ lasted about 12 months and mine lasted for about nine years,” he says, at which time he spent it to make an out-of-state career move.

Graham notes that his father’s guidance and his own aptitude for investing made a big difference in his life. But not everyone has that opportunity, Graham says. When

he was in school, he didn’t have any formal instruction about real-life financial tools. That’s why he began helping Economics Arkansas train teachers to present The Stock Market Game, a program offered to students from grades four to 12. Twenty years later, Graham is still helping promote financial literacy with the organization. He has served as president and treasurer of the board and remains an active board member.

“Lou Graham has been an exceptional board member and volunteer for many years,” says Kathleen Lawson, executive director of Economics Arkansas. “His engagement, passion and generosity are unparalleled. As a professional in the field, his support of the The Stock Market Game has been invaluable.”

A CIRCUITOUS ROUTE

Although the investment bug bit Graham at an early age, he didn’t see it as a career as he embarked on his college years. Instead, he studied religion and sociology at Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport. From there, he studied at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn.

“I had a dual option,” Graham recalls. “I could take a pulpit somewhere (as a pastor), and I didn’t really investigate that, or I could be a pastoral counselor, and I didn’t investigate that either.”

Instead, he chose politics, working in Bill Clinton’s first administration as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981. Then he moved on to the Arkansas Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to improve local communities throughout the state by providing grants and other services.

“We put together some very successful programs,” he says. “I’m kind of proud of what we did there.”

Next, he returned to politics, this time working for the campaign of a candidate for governor in Oklahoma. The candidate was soundly beaten, however, and Graham found himself out of a job. Drawing on his passion for investing, he applied for a job at E.F. Hutton in Oklahoma City as a financial adviser.

“I dressed up for it, met the manager, came back for a meeting, scored well, got the job,” Graham says.

In 1990, Graham, divorced and with two children, made the move back home to Little Rock to take a job with Merrill Lynch. He later moved to Morgan Stanley where he works today. In addition to his work there, he and his wife, Leigh, own Diane’s Gourmet catering and gift shop in Little Rock, which they bought a few years ago. Graham is also well known for his morning financial reports on Little Rock radio station KARN.

THE STOCK MARKET GAME

One morning while reading the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s High Profile section, Graham learned about a program offered by the Economics Arkansas organization known as The Stock Market Game. He knew two of the local community and business leaders involved with it — Neal Gladner and Sonya Murphy. “I looked at that and looked at the sponsors and there wasn’t a brokerage firm,” Graham says. “So I thought, well … let me see if can do that.”

Graham, along with other volunteers from the financial sector, helps teachers prepare to offer the game to their students. “I provide some training; how the markets kind of work and give them some examples to work with,” he says.

Providing training and resources in the principles of economics and personal finance to preK-12 teachers in public and independent schools in the state is the mission of Economics Arkansas. Founded in 1962 by Arch Ford, the Arkansas commissioner of education, Economics Arkansas is “a private, nonprofit, non-partisan, educational organization,” according to its website, economicsarkansas.org.

Economics Arkansas began offering The Stock Market Game in 1999. The game, a national program of the SIFMA Foundation, has three divisions: elementary (4-6 grades); junior high (7-9 grades) and senior high (10-12 grades). The state is divided into six regions with winners selected from 13-week competitions. The game is a simulation of investing in the stock market where teams of one to five students are each given a virtual $100,000 to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds. The team with the most money at the end of the competition is the winner.

“Watching the change (among students) is pretty astounding,” Graham says. “Because once they learn this stuff, they don’t unlearn it … These kids are competitive. And it teaches them these amazing skills; a lot of critical thinking.”

Ultimately, Graham says he supports the game because it helps the students, and even their families, learn to manage money well.

“It’s easy to support something that has such broad appeal in an openly capitalistic society to teach them better skills so they’re not spending the money unwisely,” Graham says, adding that one of the most important concepts for students, or anyone, to learn is the law of scarcity, which states that human wants are unlimited while resources are limited.

“Unless you are Elon Musk or Warren Buffett, you’re going to run out of money,” Graham says. “The law of scarcity applies to everybody. That’s taught in the framework of things that kids can understand; that they only have so much that they can work with.”

Since Economics Arkansas obtained the license to facilitate The Stock Market Game 25 years ago, Lawson said more than 228,000 Arkansas students have completed the investment simulation. “Arkansas is a leader nationally in the level of participation in this program,” she says.

In 2023, Economics Arkansas had a first-place team in the Capitol Hill Challenge, sponsored by the SIFMA Foundation. The winning team was from North Little Rock High School and the award included a visit to Washington where the students met U.S. Rep. French Hill and U.S. Sen. John Boozman, both R-Ark.

Support of volunteers like Graham helps make such achievements possible.

“Lou is also forward-thinking, mindfully planting seeds for growth,” Lawson says. “He has personally recruited two additional board members who continue to carry on his legacy of support. We are better because of Lou, now and in the future.”