About Us
In spring 2016, The Economics Department and The Economics & Business Club, through its Trading & Investing Initiative created a trading competition. It was coordinated by the Department of Economics, the Department of Social Science and Experiential Education at QC. The Initiative developed an educational program that allows students to apply in the real world the theories they learned in class. The Initiative developed three activities: a trading competition, trading classes and Bloomberg classes.
The competition has been taken place every semester since. It lasts for two months each semester and between 75 and 95 students participate even if we don’t advertise massively. There has been a big enthusiasm for the competition. Students are not only from the economics department but also from other departments. Ameritrade provides their platform for free.
It has been a fantastic and great motivating experience; students learn a lot not only about theories but also about the reality of the markets, how to find and use data, how it can be difficult to implement a strategy and how it can be complex. Students are put in a real-world situation and they face the reality of trading or investing in financial markets.
The students have been actively looking for profitable strategies ranging from fundamental research to pure technical analysis, using also anomalies or correlation arbitrage. For example, some winners explained that they were looking for volatile stocks that showed specific volume activities after a certain rise of the price, and then shorted the stock. Others were looking for undervalued stocks and then examined valuation. Some were searching for sector allocation, choosing sectors that were supposed to be move more actively than others because of the current stage of the business cycle. As students adopted different strategies, the volume of trading varied. Some students adopted a long-term strategy while others chose to be very active traders. The winners for the last two competition had returns of around 60%, which is remarkable.
To help the students to set up strategies, the Initiative created trading classes. Four classes were organized and taught by faculty members. The topics were trading principle, fundamental strategies, technical analysis and derivatives.
If you are interested, please click on enrollment at the top of the page and fill up the form.
If you have any question, you can contact Luc Marest (Lecturer at the economics Department) at luc.marest@qc.cuny.edu or you can go to see him at PH306H.