NYMEX Trading competition

NYMEX is the world's largest physical commodity futures exchange and the preeminent trading forum for energy and precious metals.
The NYMEX trading competition is an annual event in which several universities around USA participate. It is organized in two phases. The first phase is a desktop trading competition that gives the participants a feel of trading Natural Gas and Crude Oil futures contracts. Participants use a desktop software from CQG to execute their trades. Lessons learnt include trading, trying to understand the fundamentals that drive energy prices and risk management.

Phase 2 is organized as an Open OutCry event on the Campus of University of Houston in Bauer College of Business. This phase gives the students a chance to execute trades as a floor broker on behalf of his customers.

Currently, I am on the Graduate team for UTD participating in the Desktop trading phase. So far it has been fun and profitable, albeit with funny money.

FMA at UTD

The FMA at UTD is an active student organization that tries to help students bridge the gap between finance curriculum and finance as it is in the real world. It organizes several events, industry visits, participates in competitions.

I got involved from the Spring semester. I volunteered to update the website that had not been updated in a while. After waiting for several days, I finally was granted admin privileges and was able to make minor updates. You can visit the website here

One of the major undertaking of the FMA at UTD this semester is to start a Student Managed Investment Fund, SMIF, in short. Several B-Schools in the area and several in the US have a SMIF. The basic idea is to have the students of the B-School participate in the active management of a stock portfolio that is run like a fund. Some schools run this fund with real money from grants to endowments while some run the fund with fake money. The students learn skills from equity research and analysis, portfolio management, trading, accounting and book keeping, performance measurement and reporting. It is a great way for the students to put the lessons learnt in their course work into a real world project.

I am looking forward to participating in this effort this semester. Hopefully, we will establish it on a firm footing so that we can do this semester after semester. It will be a great attraction for prospective MBA students at UTD.

Chao.

Into my 2nd Semester of MBA at UT Dallas

I have been away from posting on my blog for a while. I hope to be more regular going forward. I started my MBA at University of Texas at Dallas from Fall 2007. I completed 3 courses in that semester. Marketing Management was an excellent course taught by Prof Biswas. I also signed up for Financial Accounting by Xu Li and Managerial Accounting by Dr Ram. It was good to be back to school as a student, however this time i also had a full time job. All in all it was enjoyable and sometimes stressful. I made several new friends.

Now, I am already into my 2nd semester and have taken 3 further courses. Financial Management by Dr Kieschnick is the toughest course i have taken at UTD so far. The other courses are Global Business by Dr Daljic and Statistics by Avanti Sethi.