Penn St. Trades its Way to Victory at Rotman
A veteran Penn St. team recently took home 1st Place in the Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC). The annual event, hosted by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, saw 34 schools (136 traders) compete for the championship. The winning team from Penn St. received $5,000. From the United States Penn St., Ohio St., Bentley, Carnegie Mellon, Fairfield, MIT, SUNY Brockport, Univ. of Michigan, and Univ. of Texas all competed.
The Penn St. team consisted of Ryan Eiler, Seung Hoon Lee, Michael J. McGregor, and Artem Gershkovich. Three of these four members had competed in the Rotman competition in the past. Each of the team’s members came from the campus’ Smeal College of Business. Students cannot simply sign-up to compete; in fact, the competition to represent Penn St. at the Rotman competition has become increasingly difficult.
One member of the team, Ryan Eiler, credited Smeal’s impressive resources with helping prepare the team. "We’re lucky to have a brand new business building and trading room, with streaming data from both the Bloomberg Professional and Reuters data services. There isn’t much, in terms of on-campus resources, that I wish we had access to that we don’t have already." In the latest Undergraduate rankings from Business Week, Smeal ranked among the top 40 business programs in the country.
The competition started with each team trading a single index futures contract. The students had access to a live news feed that was programmed to impact the index value. The second event was similar, except the students were asked to respond to quantitative prompts as opposed to the news feed. The third case focused on immediately making decisions to emulate the process that liability traders must go through when filling orders arriving from buy-side institutions. The final, and longest, part of the competition offered an energy trading case.
The event is run by Professor of Finance Tom McCurdy of the Rotman School. He says that he sees the interest in trading programs and courses increasing on campus. "More schools are using our trading platform RIT (Rotman Interactive Trader) and teaching cases in their home school curricula which means they arrived with some experience using an industry-standard order management system and better prepared concerning risks and returns that traders experience."
RIT is a proprietary platform that mimics the characteristics of real world markets and challenges its users by establishing a market environment that mirrors what current traders would experience. The RIT platform has been used in the competition since 2006 and continues to add new features and trading cases to its curriculum. The system allows for the trading of equities, fixed income, options, and futures markets. It also can be driven by computerized agents who can act as 'noise traders', 'liquidity traders', 'option traders', and 'buy-side' institutions.
As for the winning team, what did they do with the money? Why, went to the casino of course! According to Eiler, "We took a quick trip to a casino near Niagara Falls right after our win, and ended up walking out with more than we brought with us. Our prize money is in Canadian Dollars, so until we receive the check we’re cheering the "loonie" higher against the US Dollar."
