Investment Competitions

This page contains information regarding forthcoming investment competitions.

FYI, this year's Bloomberg Global Trading competition is going to be run with the following key dates

Challenge starts

October 17, 9:00 a.m. (New York Time EDT)

Starting positions entered no later than

October 24, 9:00 a.m. (New York Time EDT)

Challenge ends

November 18, 5:00 p.m. (New York Time EST)

Good luck!

Please note that this is a competition orgainzed by Bloomberg for their partner universities and is not associated with us directly. The resource on this site can help students preprare for their competition.

Objective:

Students are invited to participate in a competition of generating, testing and presenting their investment idea. Through the process of this competition. They will develop their analytical, teamwork, business awareness and presentation skills.

The final submission is a pitching document (template to follow). The shortlisted finalists will be invited to give presentations to a panel of industry and academic experts.

A general guidance regarding the process.

It consists of four overlapping steps:

1. Idea generation

Research expert ideas from the book, strategies from this website and other academic research papers. The scope is an equity investment and the idea needs to be able to tested by historical data.

2. Backtesting

Design and implement the backtesting (Bloomberg or other quantitative tools and data sources can be used). The key is demonstrating a clear replication with no look-forward bias testing.

3. Performance evaluation

Study the performance and estimate and discuss the risk, liquidity and operational aspect of the strategy.

4. Write up a one-page pitching document (this is a high-level summary of what you have done).

Students should ideally work in a team of no more than four.

For instructors

This competition can be adopted to be used for assessment. Especially, instead of a one-page pitching document, a longer strategy pitching document can be submitted. A pool of potential strategies can be found in the book and on this website. A shortlist of candidate strategies may be pre-defined to get students going. Students can further improve or alter them with different investing countries and industries.

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin

"I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful." - Warren Buffett

"Know what you own, and know why you own it." - Peter Lynch

“What will you say … if you are the next” - Investment Guru

Purpose

Experience the thrill of investing

Practice what you learn

Gain experience that you could draw on for answering exam questions

Brief summary

In a team of up to four, use Bloomberg terminals to analyse stocks and send your trading ideas to a message network where the performance of your idea will be evaluated in real-time. A performance league table will be generated weekly. The performance will be reviewed and discussed weekly. There are weekly best performance and overall best performance awards.

Setting up:

Form a team with up to four members, register a Bloomberg team login, submit the name used to create the login and your team will be added to the message network.

1. Research:

There are a number of different approaches to picking stocks as we will learn about in the book. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Pick a company that may interest you, for example, Apple or Vodaphone

• Pick a country (Germany), then a sector (Auto industry) then study which company should you invest (hit: use EQS <go> to screen out).

• More ideas on this website.

2. 'Trade' Submission:

• Send your trade idea to the trading message network on Bloomberg.

• Unless you are taking a systematic portfolio approach, try to keep the number of ideas lower than 10 at a time so that you have time to consider each one of them.

3. Interaction:

• A social media group will be created to enable students to interact with each other.

• Students are expected to have 30 minutes of group work and posting by Friday every week and 20 minutes of online interaction done by Tuesday.

• A competition normally lasts for 10 weeks during term time.

For instructors

This competition can be adopted and run within your class as we have done so over the past 10 years. We have a set of slides detailing the registration and scope of investment and competition setup. If you are interested in using these materials please email Charlie and we are happy to share with you these documents.