STUDENT PROFILE:
CALE SWEENEY
By Lori Valigra

At the ripe age of 17, Cale Sweeney has his life planned out, straight through to retirement: "After college, I want to work at a financial institution like Morgan Stanley as an aggressive stock trader, and then I want to move my dad's business to Boston after he retires. And then I'd like that company to get bought out, so I can start a hedge fund, make millions, and retire by the time I'm 40, but more realistically, by 65. Then I want to go to Aruba."

Tall, muscular, affable, and self-assured, Cale sounds more like a seasoned Wall Street trader than the senior he is at Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire. But he comes by his confidence honestly, having learned about investing from his father, a financial advisor who heads his own company, and from reading books like Barbarians at the Gate and The Idiots' Guide to Wall Street. For his senior project, Cale wants to set up a simulated mutual fund and, if possible, start an investment club at school.

Last summer Cale took two special courses for high school students at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts: a leadership seminar and Wall Street 101. Interviewed at Bentley, he talked with ease about his love of making money and his plans for doing so.

For now, though, Cale is focused on getting into college, with Bentley near the top of his list. There was little question that he would attend college, though for a brief time he flirted with enlisting in the military or becoming a philosopher.

Photo Credit: Mark Johnson Cale Sweeney, a senior at Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire, expects college to prepare him for Wall Street.

"I never questioned going to college. My parents have been persistent in pushing me in that direction," Cale explained. Both Heather and Glenn Sweeney went to the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, and both were the first in their family to go to college. Glenn runs Sweeney Financial Management in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Heather is a sixth-grade science teacher. Their younger son Ryan, 13, is in middle school.

Cale has also followed his parents' advice about taking on extracurricular activities to improve his chance of acceptance by choice colleges. He plays trombone in the high school band and joined the volleyball, lacrosse and other sports teams.

The extra activities have already paid a dividend. Cale's lacrosse team played in a national tournament in Maryland, and he went to Disneyworld with the band, twice. "That was the best time of my life," he said.

Souhegan High encourages students to take on independent activities and to shoulder responsibility. The four-year experimental public school opened in September 1992 to serve the upper-middle-class towns of Amherst and Mont Vernon. In 1997 Souhegan received initial accreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The enrollment is about 1,000.

Each Souhegan student participates in an advisory group that meets every day for 20 minutes to discuss academic and personal issues. There is no class president; instead, students run a community council. All seniors must create and exhibit a senior project, and graduation requirements include community service.

According to statistics from Souhegan, 85 percent of the 166 graduates in 1998 went on to four-year colleges and 3 percent went on to two-year colleges. Among those students, the mean verbal score on the SAT was 546 and the mean math score was 523, a few points above the statewide averages for college-bound seniors and comfortably above the national mean scores.

But only 5.6 percent of Souhegan graduates in the class of 1999 were admitted to the most competitive colleges, such as Brown University and other Ivy League schools. Almost half of the graduates were accepted at schools ranked as "competitive" by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. Those schools include Bentley, the University of Massachusetts and the University of New Hampshire.

Cale knows that his 3.2 grade-point average and his SAT scores (530 verbal and 640 math) are not strong enough to impress admissions officers at nearby Boston College or Dartmouth College. But he wants to stay in New England, and he is most enthusiastic about Bentley, Babson College, the University of New Hampshire, and Boston University. Not surprisingly, he plans to major in finance and business administration.

During his junior year, Cale began scouting colleges, with help from his school counselor, to whom he talks once a month. While visiting Bentley last spring, he spotted a flier about the special summer courses.

The first course, recommended by his father as well, was the Leadership Institute, a five-day session in July that gave 135 high school juniors and seniors a sense of what it takes to be a leader in a private enterprise. And because the course was held on Bentley's campus, they also got a taste of college life.

Each watch company had a head, a role Cale slipped into quite naturally. "I was very successful," he said confidently. "We decided we wanted to be in first place, so we took huge risks to get big rewards. We dominated sales," he said.

His team won the competition. For their efforts, each team member received a T-shirt, a neck lanyard and a $10 gift certificate.

Cale felt that the course taught him a lot about types of leadership and management skills. "I think I can get people to respect me, so they'll listen to my advice," he said. "And I listen to them, too. I try to motivate the knuckleheads, but if I can't, I focus on the group members who want to be there." Did Cale ever contemplate losing? "I don't take losing to heart," he mused. "It's not the winning or losing in the end, it's the process." But failure to meet his own expectations, he added, disappoints him, and he prefers to work alone or if he is in a group, to lead it.

The high point of the summer was Bentley's Wall Street 101 course, which fit squarely into Cale's career plans. "Wall Street 101 is one of the most beneficial, educational courses I've ever taken," he said. The seven-day course attracted 60 high school students from all over the United States.

"We learned about portfolio optimization and how to value a security and judge risk, and a Fidelity bond manager told us how bonds work," Cale said. "This was a practical education for me. I want to get right into the business world."

Cale thinks he has the right stuff to be a successful stock trader: "I'm very competitive. Wall Street and business is a good field for that." He readily dispenses investment advice such as, "A good investor can make money no matter what happens. If the market goes down, you sell short."

He was even more excited about the field trips to Boston, where students visited the Boston Stock Exchange trading floor, Federal Reserve Bank and Fleet Bank. And he practically lived in Bentley's own trading room on campus.

Cale has also taken his first steps as a stock investor. In the summer of 1999, he worked as a state park employee and earned $2,000. He invested $500 of it to buy two shares each of Genentech, a biotechnology company, and the telecommunications giant Cisco Systems.

"My dad recommended I buy the shares to see what investing is really like," he said. "Right now, I'm a little above break-even."

Glenn Sweeney has taught his son other practical life lessons. He allowed Cale to buy the red pickup truck he wanted, but Cale had to pay for half of it. The same will go for college. "My parents will pay for a good portion of my college, but I'll have to pay for some," Cale said.

Though Cale describes himself as a dreamer and somewhat of an artist, he gravitates toward quantitative matters. "I like concrete numbers. You have to have something solid to value your business, like a profit," he said.