Economics & Management Science Student Wins TMX Trading Competition
Maxwell Carr (4th year, Economics & Management Science) in the Bloomberg Lab.
The second time was a charm for Maxwell Carr (4th year, Economics & Management Science) when it came to the Montreal Exchange Options Trading Simulation (external link) .
Entering the national competition for the second year in a row, Carr finished in first place in the 9th edition, beating over 1,100 teams from across Canada and winning $10,000 in the process.
The 10-week trading competition is open to full-time students from undergraduate and MBA programs across Canada and challenges competitors to build a virtual portfolio using a simulated online trading platform. Participants begin the competition with a virtual cash account of $100,000 and must execute a series of predefined options trading strategies. By the end of the competition, Carr’s virtual portfolio increase was 244 percent, the best of any competitor across Canada.
Carr’s win was the result of a lot of research and hard work at TRSM’s Bloomberg Lab, which contributes to the eight hours of market research he does every day.
“Bloomberg provides a technical, as well as practical development of market analysis,” says Carr. “The lab allows students to test market hypotheses in real time, and bounce ideas off of other like-minded students.”
Carr says he has also learned a lot from Edward Blinder, professor of FIN601: Derivatives, who encouraged Carr to join the TMX competition and has supported his passion for investing.
“Last year’s competition was more of a dry run to understand the software”, says Carr. “I put the majority of my time into doing well on the FIN 601 project (trading exercise), so I wasn't able to do as well last year as I would have liked.”
Carr has used a very focused approach in his Economics & Management Science education, taking as many math and finance classes as possible to support his goal of becoming a trader or fund manager after graduation. His advice to other TRSM students who are interested in investing is “to study the effect fiscal and monetary objectives have on the overall economy” and to learn about economic theory, “as many of the situations described in these texts offer some insight as to the likelihood of a particular outcome given a set of circumstances.”
This is the second year in a row that a TRSM student has won the top prize in this national competition. Byron Chen (Law & Business) won in December 2015.
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