From August 25-27, 2016, LUISS hosts the second edition of the Rotman European Trading Competition (RETC), the applied finance competition for European university students in cooperation between LUISS and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
On Saturday, August 27 at 7:30 p.m., LUISS President Emma Marcegaglia and CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and President and CEO of Ferrari Sergio Marchionne will award the winning students from the 29 teams, one from each European Union member state including Great Britain and Norway.
Modeled after the annual Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC) in Toronto, the RETC consists of five contests over three days of simulation, in which the teams, each consisting of two women and two men, will compete.
"After the inauguration of the new headquarters of our business accelerator, LUISS Enlabs, and announcing its 2017 launch in Milan, we have once again highlighed talent and human capital with the Rotman European Competition, where we will launch a new sui generis startup that will contribute to the reputation of both our university and nation: the LUISS Blue Team, the team that took first place on the global level, beating out MIT and other extremely qualified universities," declares LUISS President Emma Marcegaglia. "The competition we are hosting is another opportunity to reaffirm the importance of a Europe devoted to knowledge and innovation, united and without borders."
Rector Massimo Egidi also strongly supports the initiative. "I hope that the hundreds of young people participating in the challenge, alongside the many people involved in education in universities across the continent, find an ideal trampoline for their futures here. In the world of finance, it is essential to integrate technical and scientific knowledge with other cultural, personal, cognitive, and relational skills, that have become instrumental tools to make a difference in the new international horizon. We must teach them that finance must be applied in the right way, using economic resources, scarce by definition, in the most productive and socially useful ways possible. This must be the goal of all the young traders in the European Union."
This year's competition will include a case from Enel, the Electricity Trading Case; the EIB Institute, the Interest Rate Case; and Generali, the Credit Risk Case. It will also give future finance employees the possibility to apply their classroom knowledge to actual markets, generated by the Rotman Interactive Trader (RIT), a propriety stock market simulator used in fifty universities around the world, including Stanford, MIT and Berkeley. In particular, the Enel case was designed in collaboration with the Front Office of the company's Global Trading department where brilliant young people, passionate about trading, work to protect Enel's margins in the complex world of the energy sector.
Once again, the students representing LUISS were selected by Professor Emilio Barone, instructor of the Economics of Trading Markets. The Blue Team took first place back in Toronto in 2014 and 2015, winning the eleventh and twelfth editions of the global finance simulation competition. In the 2016 Rotman International Trading Competition, the Blue Team placed second out of 52 teams, distinguishing itself as the only university from outside of the United States to have obtained such a result.
