EF students achieve high rankings in Rotman International Trading Competition again

For a second successive year, a team from the Department of Economics and Finance has done an excellent job at the Rotman International Trading Competition. The EF team was again the best-performing team in Asia, also beating prestigious universities including Harvard, UCLA, NYU, and the host, University of Toronto, to name but a few. This year’s competition, hosted by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, was held online on February 19, 2021.

The EF team comprised Shanzheng Ba, Meijia Chen, and Raymond Widjaja (all major in Computational Finance); and Yongzheng Zhi (Finance and Global Business double major). The team was coached by Dr Jintao Du and advised by Professor James Bergin of the EF Department, with assistance from a former team member, Xichen Liu, also a final year student in the Computational Finance programme. The secretary from the EF department, Rita Wong, and graduate teaching assistant, Dr Jessie Xiao, provided all the administrative support. 

The pandemic meant almost all activities were conducted online, from selecting and training team members to practice sessions and the final battle. The schedule was exceptionally unfriendly to our EF team, with a 13-hour time difference between Toronto and Hong Kong. The training was also challenging to coordinate as we had one team member in New York, another in mainland China, and two in Hong Kong. Internet traffic was lethal, sometimes swallowing million-dollar profits when the trading software could not liquidate our positions in time. Nonetheless, our EF team managed to rank 12th out of 44 teams in all three cases, including the BP Commodities Case, the Algorithmic Trading Case, and the Liquidity Risk Case. Overall, we are proud to announce that the City University of Hong Kong is once again among the top 10 universities in this international trading competition.

The results stand testimony to the pioneering e-learning practices implemented by CityU in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling high degrees of student learning and teamwork throughout the year. The presence in the Rotman International Trading Competition is, in part, a measure to boost graduate job hunting. Our success has helped team members get interviews and job offers directly from the competition sponsors, including top hedge funds and commodity companies, and establishes a reputation recognised by the industry.

Congratulations to our EF team and the City University of Hong Kong for achieving high rankings in the Rotman International Trading Competition once again!