It’s winter in Toronto. Temperatures are chilly, but inside the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, buzzing finance students are too busy to notice. They have traveled from around the world to participate in the Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC), a three-day simulated market challenge.
Babson was represented by a team of five students from a range of programs: Srivatsa Rajan Swaminathan MBA’19, John Regan MSF’19, Elena Yang ’20, Alexander Spinnell ’20, and Duska Glidden ’20. The trading team spent nearly three months preparing for the competition, including building sophisticated quantitative models that it used to guide its real-time decision making in Toronto.
“I am extremely proud of the Babson team’s dedication and ability to work under pressure,” says Ryan Davies, chair of the Finance Division and the team’s faculty advisor. “It’s particularly impressive to see how well our team competed against rivals from top graduate quantitative finance programs, such as the Carnegie Mellon Master of Science in Computational Finance and the NYU Master of Science in Financial Engineering.”
The team’s hard work was rewarded with a ninth-place finish, Babson’s best overall finish since 2010. The team dynamic was strengthened by working across undergraduate and graduate programs, pulling in MBA, Master of Science in Finance, and undergraduate students to work together.
The Babson team tackled six cases alongside teams from 51 other participating universities that hailed from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The cases explored topics including BP Commodities, Flow Traders ETF, Bridgewater Fixed Income, MATLAB Volatility Trading, Citadel Securities Algorithmic Trading, and Quant Outcry.
A Season of Success
Babson’s success in the RITC is just the latest in a spring semester hot streak for the Finance Division.
Patrick Gregory, managing director of the Stephen D. Cutler Center for Investments and Finance, advised two winning teams in recent competitions.
Vivia Chen ’19 and Sang Hyun Kim ’17 traveled to Georgia to compete in the University of Georgia’s SMIF Stock Pitch Competition. The duo placed third out of 12 finalists, taking home $1,000 in prize winnings. Judges included analysts, portfolio managers, financial advisors, and CIOs currently working in the finance sector.
In a different competition, the undergraduate team of Rushi Nagalla ’19, Mitchell Troyanovsky ’19, Guillermo Vadell ’19, and Albert Yun ’18 pulled together to win the local CFA Institute Research Challenge last month. They analyzed a publicly traded company, wrote a comprehensive research report, and then presented their research to a group of industry judges.
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