Student is Right on the Money in Contest

A finance graduate student placed 10th out of 300 competitors who squared off recently in a foreign exchange trading contest.

Andrew Wang put his mock trading account up against entries from 16 schools in three nations who participated in the competition, hosted in October and November by Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School and Global Forex Trading (GFT).

GFT allotted each student a $50,000 mock account to trade international currencies on the foreign exchange market. Armed with many of the same tools used by professional traders, students were tasked with increasing their accounts as much as possible during the month-long competition.

Wang, who represented not only UT Dallas, but also the University’s student finance organization, the Financial Leadership Association (FLA), said he decided to join the competition to learn the finer points of trading foreign exchange online.

“Investors can earn a lot of money by trading foreign exchange; however, risks are also associated with it,” Wang said. “One of the challenges I learned from the competition is that I should do a lot of research on different factors from different sources. However, I can never be 100 percent sure that I can make the right decision.”

Wang beat out students from such select universities as Columbia, MIT and Princeton.

Frank Anderson, FLA adviser and finance faculty member, said Wang and the UT Dallas team competed skillfully and have proved that UT Dallas’ finance majors can compete “with the best of them by being the best.”

“We are blessed with highly intelligent and focused students who personally assure me of why we should have so much hope for our nation’s future,” Anderson said.

First place winner of the trade competition was former Texas A&M Mays Business School student Brazos Lackey, followed by 2nd place winner Zeeshan Khan of Penn State. Third place went to Joshua Groner, also of the Mays School.

The competition awarded the top trader a $10,000 GFT Forex trading account, which the student may use to trade for six months and keep any net profits.

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