LUISS has won third place in the University Trading Challenge, the most important international online trading university championship in the world. The competition, organized by Directa, uses real money to trade.
The LUISS Blue Team is made up of Elia Bernacchini, Ylenia Franetti, Marina Scavalli, Simone Letta (team leader) and Manuele Rivosecchi, LUISS students registered in their second year of the degree program in Financial Economics. The students were selected by Emilio Barone, a professor of the Economics of the Securities Markets.
The fourth annual competition, featuring 111 teams, took place over 27 weeks and ended on May 22, 2014 with an awards ceremony in Rimini. Each team was entrusted with € 5,000. The LUISS students saw gains of around 70% over the course of the seven-month competition and faced the difficulties and risks of the trading profession every day. Thirteen countries were represented, including Germany, France and the Czech Republic.
This represents another success for the LUISS Blue Team, after their victory at the first annual University Trading Competition and the gold medal they earned last February in Toronto at the Rotman International Trading Competition.
According to Professor Emilio Barone, who counts Luca Maestri, the current CFO of Apple, among his former students, "There were so many ingredients that contributed to their success. First of all, their quality and the tenacity: there was a moment when they lost everything they had slowly accumulated, but they didn’t give up.”
In the history of the University Trading Challenge, no team has ever managed to get on the podium twice.