NZ university students achieve 700 per cent return

New Zealand university students achieve 700 per cent return on virtual investment

CMC Markets National Trading Challenge creates lasting legacy

AUCKLAND, October 12, 2015 – The University of Auckland engineering students, Patrick Sun, 21 and Joshua Dawes, 22, have been crowned as the winning team of the 2015 CMC Markets National Trading Challenge, with a 700 per cent return on investment.

The annual trading competition, now in its fifth consecutive year, empowers students from across New Zealand to put trading strategies into practice, with the objective to attain the highest return on investment over the full month of September.

Participating teams commence with a virtual account of $50,000, allowing them to trade in a range of financial derivative instruments, including shares, currencies, commodities and global indices, via the award-winning CMC Markets online trading platform.

This year, the competition has grown exponentially, attracting 296 student teams, limited to two students per team, from 100 teams last year.

Prior to the event, each team is encouraged to educate themselves on market news and attend a platform training session at the University of Auckland. Teams can pay an additional entry fee to ‘reset’ their account balance to $50,000 in the first three days, as they familiarise themselves with the platform and the challenges of trading live.

Patrick Sun of the winning team said, “We always considered investment banking as an extremely tough and interesting field, and wanted to understand what it was like. This competition provided a rare opportunity for us, as engineering students, to get a taste of trading, and after our experience, we can say it is extremely stressful, but also very rewarding.

“Due to the nature of the competition, our strategy was to leverage large amounts on volatile assets such as crude oil and indices, and carefully set up take-profits and stop-loss values.”

“The most valuable lesson we learnt was to remain calm when something unexpected happens in the market, as when we panicked and followed the market, we incurred even larger losses when it rebounded,” Mr Sun added.

Jessica Channing and Hayden Berkers, Co-Presidents of the Management Consulting Club (MCC) said the competition contributes significantly to the development of students alongside their study.

“As a student organisation our focus is on providing our members with the skills, knowledge and experience they need to become better business people. As the competition does not involve significant capital requirements or risk, with CMC Markets we are able to get our students as close to the trading floors as possible, where they are able to apply their existing trading theories and develop new ones. No doubt such experiences have been invaluable in the creation of the next generation of financial traders,” Mr Berkers said.

Ms Channing said, “We are very grateful to have an ongoing relationship with CMC Markets and this years’ event has been a huge success. The competition grew to 296 student teams participating this year, which we see as a testament to both the enjoyment and the valuable learning opportunity that students get out of it. We also appreciate the Business School for being supportive of our events as we believe the University agrees that extra-curricular activities enhance the student experience.”

Chris Smith, General Manager of CMC Markets New Zealand said, “CMC Markets is proud to support the development of under graduate students with an interest in trading and the financial markets. This is the fifth year we have partnered with MCC to offer students the opportunity to test their skill set and learn using our market leading online trading platforms. The lasting legacy of competitions like this is that they provide real-life experience for graduates, and prepare them for the next phase, giving them the competitive edge valued in the workforce.”

ENDS

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