Teams from the University of P.E.I. faculty of business had a successful showing at the 11th annual Montreal Exchange's Options Trading Simulation.
The 10-week competition pitted more than 1,500 teams from 38 universities against each other in a simulated exchange. Teams from UPEI took third and 12th places.
Teams are given a starting balance of a notional $100,000 and have 10 weeks to trade in financial securities to make money and complete mandatory strategies.
UPEI's top team was Billy Capital, made up of Sam Aulie and Marcus Power. The team placed third overall, securing UPEI's best ever result in terms of rank and ending portfolio value. They finished the competition with $254,807.75, benefitting early from a well timed "put option", a financial instrument that makes money when the underlying share price drops.
"We made a lot of our money right before Andrew Left (an activist short seller) went on the news and talked about Shopify being a sham," said Aulie. "After that, the share price dropped 20 per cent and we made our bulk of the money there."
For their efforts, the team won $2,500 of real money.
UPEI's second best showing came from Corporate Panthers, Kearah Davis, Rudolph Al Aswad, Caroline Carey and Yohannes Yosefe. The team's ending balance was $151,038. The students took part in 288 trades over the 10-week competition.
