Duke FinTech Intercollegiate Trading Competition Kicks Off for Spring 2022
January 27, 2022 | Duke FinTech
The annual trading competition sponsored by Duke’s Master of Engineering in FinTech program kicked off this month, supported by some extraordinary companies.
This month, Duke FinTech kicked off the Annual Duke FinTech Intercollegiate Trading Competition—welcoming over 150 students from 40 different universities across the globe to compete against their peers for cash prizes and, perhaps most importantly, internationally recognized bragging rights.
The trading competition gives graduate and undergraduate students an opportunity to apply what they are learning in the classroom and try out investment strategies using real-time market data and the same user interface and features utilized by professional traders. Over the course of the compassion, students will make trades in an effort to grow their initial portfolio of $1 million USD in simulated currency. Trades are made in paper trading accounts provided by the Student Trading Lab at Interactive Brokers, allowing students the ability to trade in all of the listed asset classes that one might expect, as well as cryptocurrencies.
This year’s competition is led again by Professor Jake Vestal, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Pratt School of Engineering, who sees the competition as much as a teaching tool as it is a contest. "This competition is special because in puts one of the Duke FinTech Program’s core values into practice: the taking on of risk (unavoidable in any endeavor) in a disciplined, well-reasoned manner, " shared Vestal. "Our competition recognizes that being able to correctly predict 8 coin tosses in a row is a ‘skill’ that one out of 256 student traders possesses. Instead of declaring that one lucky trader the winner, Duke FinTech believes in rewarding acuity over gambling by ranking student traders according to their risk adjusted return (Sharpe Ratio) as opposed to simple realized return." This approach encourages shrewd investing and provides students with the opportunity to test out their own unique strategies, quantitative algorithms, and other methodologies.
This year, competition prizes will be awarded in both USD and ZEN cryptocurrency, thanks to support from some extraordinary companies:
Regularly updated competition rankings and team standings can be found at www.fintechtradingcompetion.com
This year, represented institutions include:
| Beijing University of Technology | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | |
| Boston University | Shenzhen University | |
| Carnegie Mellon University | Southern University of Science and Technology | |
| Case Western Reserve University | Texas A&M University | |
| Claremont Graduate University | The University of Chicago | |
| Colorado College | University of California, Los Angeles | |
| Cornell University | University of California, San Diego | |
| Duke University | University of California, Santa Barbara | |
| Georgetown University | University of Georgia | |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | University of Hawaii | |
| Grinnell College | University of Michigan | |
| Harvard University | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | |
| Hunan University | University of North Carolina at Charlotte | |
| Nanyang Technological University | University of Rochester | |
| New York University | University of South Carolina | |
| North Carolina State University | University of Southern California | |
| Northeastern University | University of Texas at Austin | |
| Princeton University | Vanderbilt University | |
| Rutgers University | Washington University in St. Louis | |
| School of Visual Arts | Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University |