Students square off as traders

Executives from top U.S. energy and trading firms came to Tulane University last weekend to see some of the country’s best college and university traders-in-training face off to prove who could get the best risk-adjusted returns trading mock oil and gas futures. Twenty-eight students from six universities put their skills to the test in Tulane’s cutting-edge trading room at the inaugural Tulane Energy Trading Competition in New Orleans using the same Trading Technologies X_TRADER trading platform used by leading firms. Students were also equipped with charting software from Thompson Reuters. “This is probably the closest thing you can get to actually trading besides committing actual value and risking actual money,” says first-place winner Aneal Tenjarla of the University of Texas at Austin, who will work as a financial analyst after graduation. “Before this competition, I really didn’t know much about different trading strategies, different patterns of trading or how to use this technology. By the end of this, I felt like I got a good education.” What sets Tulane’s contest apart from most trading competitions is that the winners weren’t selected by who made the most money. Instead, the contest rewarded players for trading strategies that minimized risk while maintaining profits, which is an environment closer to what a new trader would face on the job. “The idea was to create a trading competition that is more aligned with what employers want in the marketplace,” says Joe LeBlanc, assistant director of the Tulane Energy Institute and organizer of the event. “We think that by adjusting for risk, combining several different performance measures and using the best trading software from Trading Technologies and Thomson Reuters, we’re creating a competition that rewards responsible trading and more accurately reflects the way trading is truly practiced in today’s energy firms.” The competition also attracted executive observers and judges from leading energy firms, including Mirant Corp., TXU/Luminant, Geneva Trading, Sequent Energy, Webster Capital, Aardvark Energy, ConocoPhillips, CitiGroup, Entergy Corp., Shell Trading, LIM, Johnson Rice and Goldman Sachs.