Silberman students place 41st out of 1,727 teams for the 2023 Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge
FDU Silberman College of Business
Congratulations are in order for Christopher J. Leon BS’25, John Rolli BS’27, Andrew Piombino BS’27, and Aaron Santos BS’25 on their success in the 2023 Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge! Out of 2,007 teams, they placed 41st.
The competition started on October 9 and ran through November 17. Here are the details:
“Through this competition, teams of 3–5 students (led by a faculty advisor) will compete against other top students around the world to experience firsthand what real-world investing looks and feels like. Teams will use the Terminal to define market assumptions, develop a return-generating strategy, and execute trades within a closed network. The winning team will have the highest time-weighted relative return, relative to the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Price Return Index (WLS Index).”
Silberman also ran a competition amongst the Student Managed Investment Fund members and rewarded the team with a prize for the team that placed highest.
The approach we took with our positions was understanding that the event was short term, so we needed to concentrate in specific sectors and with companies that had high growth potential in that period. When the trading challenge event began, I took into consideration the conflict in Israel and Palestine, and researched what companies were going to be involved or at least speculated to have an impact and invested in them. For example, I read that Palantir was going to be helping by delivering AI powered drones to carry out war operations. But our best performer happened to be Roku, which is a streaming platform. I read that Roku stock was trading near five-year lows because its revenue growth had slowed, and its expenses had soared. But in Q3, revenue was up 20% year over year, due to growth in active accounts and streaming hours. Oracle was another big winner for us, I happened to buy in at the right time just as it took off due to recent AI hype which was a big factor I took into consideration. My strategy was to take advantage of the recent AI hype then dabbling with a few other companies I felt were strong competitors to grow within that period. Some of the companies I invested in that were affected by AI were Oracle, Palantir, Nvidia, UiPath, SMCI, and Tesla. -Christopher Leon
Silberman is extremely proud of these students and the SMIF club. The Student Managed Investment Fund club has gained quite some traction over the last year and continues to retain its members with a packed room every Tuesday in the Bloomberg Labs.
