Later this year, Associate Professor of Business Administration Omid Sabbaghi will shepherd two teams of Business students through an international trading competition. They’ll have to work hard to better last year’s Detroit Mercy representatives who placed fifth out of more than 450 teams from around the world.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group Trading Challenge is a four-week electronic trading competition. Last year, some 2,000 students formed 468 teams from 200 universities and 30 countries participated in the competition that asks teams to trade using live data in a simulated environment, through futures contracts such as crude oil and corn under rules and regulations by which actual traders must abide.
Each team started the preliminary rounds with a fictional $100,000 to invest. The top 50 teams went to the championship round. In the finals, the Detroit Mercy team began with $250,000 and finished with nearly $324,000.
Detroit Mercy’s team of Tome Ivezaj, Jeff Palleschi, Josh Pritchard, Nino Sujashvili and Chris Scagnetti, with faculty advisor Sabbaghi came in fifth place and first among all Catholic business schools in the competition.
Though this is the third year Detroit Mercy students have participated in the challenge, it is the first time a team from the University made the final round. Sabbaghi said the Financial Markets Lab, which opened in the Fall 2015 term, was instrumental in motivating this team to participate in the challenge.
“The challenge is as close to reality the students can get to in terms of testing out their investment strategies and knowledge gained in class,” Sabbaghi said. “This is a great experiential learning opportunity for our students and I think the lab helped us to place so high this year.”
Sabbaghi said employers are looking for students with real-world experiences and the lab and opportunities to participate in events like the CME Challenge provide that opportunity to the students.
In other competition news, a team of three graduate students from Detroit Mercy placed in the top 8 percent of competitors in the TD Ameritrade Think or Swim Challenge, which ended in November.
The team of Kevin Deidrick, Keigh Crispen and Mary Eicher placed 58th out of 726 teams nationwide that competed in the four-week electronic simulated trading competition. In the challenge, students compete through paper trading on the Think or Swim trading platform, gaining real-world trading experience, explore strategies and practice order types in current markets.
