Following an invitation from ESCP Europe, London, three teams from Regent’s University London recently battled it out for top spot in the Energy Trading Challenge, and secured a highly impressive third overall position, ahead of some of Europe's finest business schools.
A financial trading simulation held on the ESCP Europe campus, Regent’s teams competed against the UK’s top universities, including LSE, LBS, and Imperial College, amongst others.
Regent’s was able to secure a strong third position overall (based on a calculation of sum of absolute returns), trumping Europe’s finest business schools.
Heading the returns was MSc Oil and Gas Trade Management team Point Blanc, lead by Karim Henide (Global Financial Management), who spoke of his team’s experience of the competition: “We were well-equipped for the competition - displaying comfort in the trading of a plethora of financial products designed to provide exposure to oil/gas trading instruments (ranging in sophistication), optimising our exposure (and respective positions) through a variety of crack, geographical and calendar spreads, managing those trades, ensuring that we kept to the stringent (outright and asset-specific) exposure caps, unwinding our positions efficiently and maintaining equilibrium across our trading book.
“We adopted the investment fund model. The workload was delegated to individual members, and through a consistent feedback loop, we were able to reflect our aggregate stance into positions, doing so with a combination of technical and fundamental analysis.
“I speak on behalf of all participants when I say Regent’s launched us into this competition as winners. Our practical and insightful preparation provided us with an edge and empowered us in our trading - we were proud to be the only institution also to have our professors (Dr Elias Boukrami and Professor Abdulkader Aljandali) with us, providing us with their presence and support throughout, creating for us a nurturing and inspiring environment, reminiscent of the environment that we are most privileged to share at Regent’s.
“I would like to recognise the work of Dr Elias Boukrami, who assumed a significant risk and workload in sacrificing his personal time to organise this lifetime opportunity, investing in us his confidence and expertise, unconditionally, for our benefit and for the benefit of Regent’s. For this, we are truly thankful.”
Dr Elias Boukrami echoed Karim’s sentiments, adding: “I was fully confident on the ability of our students and their qualities. We are very proud of them, they have honoured their institution (Regents’) and their respective programmes.
“We were very honoured to receive this invitation to participate in this 2018 Energy Trading Challenge, organised by ESCP Europe (a top French business school), as only the best business schools in Europe were invited.
“Our three teams represented three programmes; Msc OGTM, Msc Finance and BAGM. Team 1, Point Blanc, had two students from BAGM, one Msc FIN and one from Msc OGTM. This was the best performer. This shows that Regent’s students complement each other well, and having a very diverse and global student body is a privilege and competitive advantage over other institutions.
“My team and I would like to thank our VC and CEO Professor Aldwyn Cooper, who has been very supportive since day one, as well as our Dean Professor Michael Luger, who came to encourage students personally in the preparation trading class.”
