BY JESSICA STEELEY
Clarkston News Staff Writer

Clarkston student Alex Czarnecki represented Everest Collegiate High School in the 60th Science & Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit.
Czarnecki received second place in his category: Robotics and Intelligent Machines. He began working on his project in September through an independent study with Nghiem Nguyen, an Everest math and computer science teacher.
“I wanted to do something with machine learning and Mr. Nguyen came up with the idea of applying it to the stock market,” Czarnecki said. His project uses five common stock picking strategies and applies them in a computer program.
“I did a little bit of guidance with him,” Nguyen said. “I gave him a bunch of choices, just to kind of narrow down the scope of computer science research, because there’s a lot.”
Czarnecki started coding the program in October and worked on it until the date of the fair on March 15.  He researched different methods for choosing stocks and, based on how they performed, his machine learning program would either add or remove the amount of money it could use.
Nguyen said Czarnecki was the first student from Everest’s high school to compete. The competition is open to sixth through twelfth graders and annually has well over 1,000 participants.
Most of Czarnecki’s independent study time was spent on his project, with his teacher’s oversight. Nguyen also showed him scholarly research on machine learning and went over the five methods of investing for when to buy and sell stocks.
“We spent a lot of time just me explaining and learning a little bit myself, how those methods work and what’s the fundamental ideas behind it,” Nguyen said.
As a junior at Everest, Czarnecki isn’t sure where he wants to go to college yet, but he hopes to study computer science and continue to expand on this project.
“I want to expand it further because there’s a lot of things I would like to do with it,” Czarnecki said. “For one, converting it to real time data, because previously it was running on historical data and another thing is that it doesn’t take dividends into account, so, changing that would probably create different results.”