Congratulations to the Brighton Business School students who were awarded second place in the highly competitive University Trading Challenge.
The University Trading Challenge provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate how the knowledge they have gained at University can be put into place in real-life financial scenarios. Fifteen teams took part in the challenge, which took place during November and December 2011. Universities competing included Kingston, City, Greenwich, Derby, Cranfield, Middlesex, UCL and Coventry.
The University of Brighton entered 2 teams. The team comprising Kate Merkulova, Anja Junges, Deividas Kazlauskas and Emma Hawksworth came second overall, having won the long-term trading challenge. The second team comprised Liam Gerrard, Shahnawaz Shinwari, James Comer and Nicholas Hemming.
Brighton Business School students celebrate their success. From left to right: Emma Hawksworth, Liam Gerrard, James Comer, Anja Junges, Deividas Kazlauskas and Kate Merkulova
Individually, two Brighton Business School students came in the top three, with Deividas Kazlauskas and Kate Merkulova narrowly missing out on the pole position on the final day.
There were three components to the challenge: a short term trading competition, a presentation and a long-term trading competition.
On the 2 December, the teams went to Canada Square in Canary Warf to present their solution to a case study and to participate in the short-term trading game. The case study involved finding a solution to the risk faced by a fictional gold mining company with exposure to interest rate, commodity and foreign exchange risk.
The application of theory to such a case study was extremely challenging as the majority of the students were in their second year of study and had quite modest coverage of derivative markets, but they all said that they learnt a lot from the experience and that they were eager to learn more.
The final challenge was a short-term trading competition. Students used Capital Markets Simulator to react to news events in an order-driven market. The University of Brighton team came third in this exercise. These sort of simulated case studies, designed to put theory into practice, are a major component of the trading room modules that are offered at Brighton Business School so we hope, with practice, to do even better in the competition in 2012.
For more details see http://uk.universitytradingchallenge.com.