Double win for Derby Business School at annual University Trading Challenge

A team of Banking and Finance students from the University of Derby scooped two awards at this year’s University Trading Challenge (UTC), making it the third consecutive year that Derby Business School students have won.

Claire Trythall, Randy Effah, Mohammad Rafi Zafar, along with contributions from Syed Abdul, picked up two prizes – second place for ‘Overall Team Performance’ and the ‘Individual Real Time Trading Champion’ prize, which was won by Mohammad Rafi Zafar.

The UTC is an annual competition open to teams of four who go head-to-head in simulated financial situations across four main challenges: Real Market News Trading, Portfolio Trading, Forex Trading and presenting a Risk Management case-study.

This year, the competition was hosted by Kingston Business School at Kingston University on Friday (December 4), where 10 other universities competed in the challenge. 

Dr Weiwei Yang, Senior Lecturer in Finance and Economics at Derby Business School, said: “I am very proud of our students. The team are all undergraduate top-up students yet they successfully competed against specialist teams of postgraduate students in the challenge.

“They applied their knowledge learned from classes exceptionally well to the real world and demonstrated their talent in trading.

“The competition involves using an industry-standard financial trading platform which allows our students to trade real time prices for a wide range of financial assets. It provides them with a real sense of daily life as a trader and experience of the competition in the financial world.

“It also helps our students to develop key employability skills such as team work, presentation skills, commercial awareness and analytical skills.”

Claire Trythall, who studies the BA in Banking and Finance (top-up) added: “It feels great to have won against the other universities that took part. We spent months working on our presentation and strategy, so our hard work paid off!

“Taking part in the UTC has meant we have gained experience of what it's like to trade, so this will help us in the future as it means we already have had a taster of what trading is really like.

“Studying at the University of Derby has been fantastic. The lecturers are very enthusiastic and know so much about their subject and I've learned so much during my time here.”

Last year (2014) the student team scooped two prizes: second place in ‘Overall Team Performance’ and the Portfolio Trading prize. Economics lecturers from the University of Derby were also awarded the ‘UTC Special Award’ for continuous support.

Find out more about Derby Business School and the courses available