Announcement

27 Jan 2022

Link to Official Announcement

Duke FinTech Annual InterCollegiate Trading Competition

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 competition, students will make trades in an effort to grow their inital 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!

This year, represented schools include:

Beijing University of Technology

Boston University

Carnegie Mellon University

Case Western Reserve University

Claremont Graduate University

Colorado College

Cornell University

Duke University

Georgetown University

Georgia Institute of Technology

Grinnell College

Harvard University

Hunan University

Nanyang Technological University

New York University

North Carolina State University

Northeastern University

Princeton University

Rutgers University

School of Visual Arts

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shenzhen University

Southern University of Science and Technology

Texas A&M University

The University of Chicago

University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, San Diego

University of California, Santa Barbara

University of Georgia

University of Hawaii

University of Michigan

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

University of Rochester

University of South Carolina

University of Southern California

University of Texas at Austin

Vanderbilt University

Washington University in St. Louis

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University