By Brian Bohl and Samuel Rubenfeld
Six University Master’s of Business Administration students parlayed fake funds into real cash, posting a second place finish in the national New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) Commodities Challenge.
A team of Zarb School of Business students-Tansel Alan, Jessie Chen, Kay Hung, Steven Monti, Ronak Shah and Swapnil Shah-participated in a contest that featured 25 teams from 20 colleges.
The six University students, advised by finance professor Ahmet Karagozoglu, who is the academic director of the Martin B. Greenberg Trading Room in C.V. Starr Hall, succeeded at the two-part electronic trading competition. The teams received $100,000 and $250,000 worth of trading allowances, with the first part consisting of an “open outcry” component and the second, an investment of artificial funds into the real-life NYMEX crude oil and natural gas sector conducted on the World Financial Center’s floor.
“Sometimes traders in the market say, ‘I remember where I was when the Dow hit 10,000,'” Karagozoglu said in a Newsday article. “Now the students can say: ‘I was trading in the market when crude oil futures hit all-time records.'”
After finishing third in the contest last year, the University recorded a 27 percent return in less than two months to take second, behind the University of Texas in Dallas. George Washington University finished third.
The Zarb students also netted personal honors, with four of the top 12 individual traders coming from the University, more than any school in the competition, according to a University statement. That list included Hung, Monti, Juan Gutierrez and Jenna Tevere, all of whom took home cash prizes.
At the 2007 NYMEX Commodities Challenge’s open outcry trading competition, six University students placed in the top 10.
The team portion of the challenge pitted the University against many prestigious universities, including Brown, Columbia, Penn State and Yale. The “open outcry” section was conducted on April 11 in New York City’s NYMEX headquarters and on April 19 at the University of Houston. The electronic trading phase lasted from Feb. 13 to April 8.
The University co-sponsored the competition, along with Columbia University, the University of Houston and the New York Mercantile Exchange. Student groups, including the University’s Quants & Traders and Columbia’s SIPA Energy Association, together with NYMEX, co-hosted the open outcry trading competition held at NYMEX on April 11.
“I attribute their success to their motivation, dedication and hard work; to the knowledge they acquired in his Futures Markets course; and to the additional workshops and training sessions I conducted in the Martin B. Greenberg Trading Room utilizing the facility’s resources like the Bloomberg Professional terminals and other various trading simulation applications,,” Karagozoglu said in the University statement.
This story was supplemented by a report from Newsday.