Smeal Team Wins International Trading Competition Held In Toronto

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (March 3, 2008) – A team of four finance students from Penn State's Smeal College of Business defeated teams from 33 other universities to win the 2008 Rotman International Trading Competition hosted by the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

This is the second time in the event's five-year history that a Smeal team has won the Rotman competition and the fourth time that the college has placed in the top five.

Seniors Ryan Eiler, Artem Gershkovich, and Michael J. McGregor, and junior Seung Hoon Lee will share the $5,000 CAD cash prize, and they also won a plaque that will be displayed in Smeal's Trading Room.

The Rotman competition utilizes simulated trading cases that closely mimic different aspects of real world markets. The event provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate their trading skills in four simulated types of markets: open outcry, quantitative outcry, sales and trading, and energy commodities trading.

"Our team was really well balanced and great at working off of our individual members' strengths," says Gershkovich. "If one of us was weaker in one area, another one of us could take the lead in that sector."

After being selected for the Toronto trip through in an in-house competition between about 60 Smeal students, the four team members had about three weeks to prepare for the Rotman competition. The first round of the competition required the team to build a model for pricing natural gas futures.

"Going into the competition on the first day, we thought our model was OK, but we weren't exactly sure how it would compare to what the other schools brought to the table," Gershkovich says. However, it turned out that the model they designed was so good, in fact, that they got requests for a copy of it from the dean of Rotman and a representative from BP North America, a sponsor of the competition and the company at the center of the simulated natural gas case.

Trusting their models, controlling emotions, and casting a careful eye on the information they were given about their cases ultimately led the Smeal team to victory, Gershkovich says. Overall, the entire experience will help prepare them for their future careers in finance, according to the team's adviser, David Haushalter, clinical assistant professor of finance.

The three seniors graduate in May and have jobs lined up with firms like J.P. Morgan and UBS. For now, Lee plans to complete a summer internship before returning to Smeal in the fall.

In addition to Smeal, teams from the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, Dublin City University, and the Rotman School finished in the top five.

Complete details regarding the competition are available online at www.rotman.utoronto.ca/finance/lab/competitions-itc08-home.asp.