Italian students shine in financial-trading challenge

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Italian students shine in financial-trading challenge

By Elisa Cecchi (ANSA.IT) 18:04, November 15, 2013

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Milan, November 12 - Italian post-secondary students have ranked among top European teams at the University Trading Challenge, an international online trading championship.

The competition, which kicked off on October 30 and runs through May 9, is organized by online broker Directa and has reached its fourth edition.

Students are allowed to trade and invest real money on financial markets to gain hands-on experience in finance.

Top scorers in the first ranking of the challenge released on Monday were German students from the University of Magdeburg who achieved a market gain of 16.78%, followed by two Italian teams from the Universita' Cattolica in Piacenza - +10.04% - and the Luiss university in Rome - +3.59%.

The economics departments of the University of Modena and Pisa ranked fourth and fifth, gaining respectively 2.79% and 1.62%.

As many as 14 teams finished in the red, including a new team from the Czech Republic. Teams are given 5,000-euro grants that can be leveraged to as much as 25,000 for investments through online trading on financial exchanges.

This year students can also trade in foreign currency markets for the first time.

Teams will be selected based on market performance and will be allowed to keep their investments while losses will be borne by Directa.

''At the moment we are only trading on Forex'', the foreign exchange market, said Davide Ceruti, who heads the 'Daruma' team from Piacenza.

He said the team could start operating on the stock market ''around February-March'' if ''things go well and we have a surplus''.

Students are vying to ''beat the result of last year's German winners'', said the head of the team, though it ''won't be easy''.

The winning squad from Germany achieved a market gain of 124% in seven months.

Italian teams won the previous two years.

The top team will be awarded a 20,000-euro prize for teaching and research.