The Economics & Finance Department's student Erik Winzer recently finished in 2nd place in the Competition out of 589 international students in 45 countries.
The ETF Global Portfolio Challenge is a virtual investment competition open to undergraduate and graduate students worldwide and it’s designed to teach students about the ETF industry by offering a window into simulated real-life investing. We have been promoting this competition to our students for the past two years.
This competition provides an individual-based, simulated investment challenge for students to compete with Exchange Traded Products (ETP) portfolios using their research skills and macroeconomic knowledge. Through the Stockfuse game platform, the participants are required to construct a portfolio with 4 - 10 ETFs using a virtual endorsement of $100,000. In weekly trades, the participants compete against each other to construct the top performing portfolio of ETFs.
Erik mentions: "In this challenge, I constructed a portfolio that returned 23.90% [compared to the S&P500: 3.48%] in 11 weeks (21 February 2023 - 5 May 2023). The most challenging task was to predict important political and economic announcements and decisions and to identify and correctly assess macroeconomic trends and their impact on the different asset classes. The participation period was marked by macro-economic shocks such as the OPEC+ oil supply cut, the sharp and continuous central bank rate hikes, and the bank collapses of Credit Suisse, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank."
He adds: "I overcame these challenges through deliberate and controlled trades of leveraged long and short ETFs, so that I was able to achieve a high return in this short period even under the difficult circumstances, while the S&P500 as a benchmark only slightly increased in value."
As a result of his success, Erik will be invited to the ETP Forum in New York this coming November where he will be mentioned on stage and will be able to network with professionals from the banking industry. The ETP Forum is a comprehensive one-day program that has been built upon the premise of allowing Advisors & Institutions the opportunity to take a deep dive into the most relevant investment themes of the year.
Erik remarks: "I am looking forward to participating as it allows me to network with numerous financial professionals of the Asset Management industry. Moreover, I hope they will reactivate the private NASDAQ tour as part of the competition price as they had it included pre-COVID."