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The Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC) is an annual event held in Toronto, Ontario, the heart of Canada's financial district. Hosted by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, the competition brings teams of students and faculty from universities worldwide to participate in a unique 3 day conference. RITC'08 will be held on February 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, 2008.
RITC utilizes simulated trading cases that closely mimic different aspects of real world markets. Having developed these cases in its state of the art Financial Research and Trading Lab, the RITC promises to present teams with challenges that are pertinent to current market participants. While past competitions have been wildly successful, we continue to improve on the old cases and introduce new ones. After adopting the Rotman Interactive Trader (RIT) platform in the 2006 competition and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback, we are looking to further utilize RIT's newly added features to offer more variety in our trading cases and a better trading experience. Please visit RIT's official website for more information on the application and supported cases.
Due to logistical constraints, the competition has a limitation on the number of teams that can participate. We strongly encourage faculty from each school to accompany their team as either a coach or observer. If your school is interested in sending a team, please have a faculty, staff, or club head fill in a registration form here.
Social Outcry Results
Here
Competition Photos!
Here (Social Outcry photos coming soon!)
RITC 2008 Debriefing
Dear Competitors,
I would like to begin by thanking you one last time for participating at the 2008 Rotman International Trading Competition. As organizers, all that we can do is provide the playing field. Your enthusiasm, preperation, and participation ensured that the event was the huge success that it was.
As is customary, I will provide you with a brief summary of some of my observations based on different things we expected to happen versus what actually happened. As always, your feedback is highly appreciated.
The Schedule
We expanded the schedule again this year, moving from last year's format of three cases on Friday & one case on Saturday to two on each day. The major benefit of this change is that mornings start an hour later and evenings end much earlier. Many participants in the past expressed interest in having more time to explore (mainly party in) Toronto and I think our schedule changes and the BP social helped accomplish this. While some competitors this year mentioned there was too much downtime, I think this is best solved by scheduling events (mainly speakers or workshops) during the heat rests, i.e. during BP & S&T when traders are substituting.
I anticipate holding the same schedule constant for next year, with a few changes. Wine during the awards ceremony would certainly be a nice addition. Also, we will work on confirming the results quicker so that we can proceed with the awards more quickly. Lastly, competitors requested some sort of after-party. I think this is a great idea and it's certainly something we'll do next year. This year I managed to make it out to a bar later in the evening and met up with 4-5 teams but would have preferred something more organized with more participants.
The Cases
Surprisingly, many competitors noted in their feedback that we had too much outcry. I think since we added the social outcry session last year, we reached the tipping point where there is too much. (3 hours per person total). The overall plan is to drop the Open Outcry event next year and replace it with another electronic case. Ultimately I would expect to see Social Outcry, Quant Outcry, and 3 electronic cases next year.
Open Outcry/Quant Outcry
This is the first year that we have relaxed the volume constraint of 5 contracts per ticket and added the soft/hard limits. Gladly, no schools hit their hard limits! One observation that we made was that the soft/hard penalties were not calibrated well, i.e. soft penalties were small, hard penalties were large. We'll work on adjusting these next year. In regards to ticket entry, last year's introduction of the trading stamp made ticket data much more reliable. Further, our process change to have trading pairs submit their tickets increased accuracy and decreased lost tickets. We have already begun experimenting with a newer system which would add level 3 + 4 data to the outcry systems where you will be able to view individual trader results, actual trades, and scanned copies of trade tickets directly on the portal. Based on your feedback, the quant outcry and open outcry were ranked the 3rd and 4th out of the 4 cases respectively.
Sales & Trader Case
The perennial favorite, the Sales & Trader was ranked first again. This case is pretty straight forward and many of you noticed we made a significant twist by adding 5 very different scenarios with different securities. Some students have asked that we provided more practice on these sessions, however, we specifically make it challenging by giving you limited time and information on the securities. One thing I would like to note is that I didn't see many traders taking advantage of the feature that we added to RIT that allows you to input orders directly from the Market-Depth View module. I'd strongly suggest people look into this for future years. Also, there was an absence of trading models for the S&T case. With the Excel Data link, you can link the top 20 bids/asks in each book to determine market liquidity and depth in real time, something that could be very helpful in the S&T case. Overall, I'm very happy that you are all still very fond of our RIT Flagship case.
BP Canada Energy Trading Case
This case is a culmination of all of our case building techniques that we have developed over the past 5 years at RITC. I'm extremely happy with how this case turned out and it appears that it traded on the market very well also. Overall, I believe the majority of people had incorrect (or no) models, versus those that had correct models. Towards the last few seconds of each month, traders should have been able to solve the exact settlement price and the market price should converge to that value. In reality, we constantly saw fights in the market as rational traders attempted to push the market towards its theoretical price while irrational traders pushed it away.
This was certainly the most technical of the cases, in that those with a strong model had a large advantage over those who without. This is a desired separation as we want the most talented students who prepare the most to achieve the best results. Provided everybody had correct models, a large amount of trading/analytical skill still exists in this case since it is very difficult to forecast the effects of many of our news releases.
Technical Problems
This year's technical issue was that our externally hosted Open Outcry web-server could not handle the load of all of our users. The solution arrived later that night when they moved our hosting to a new server. We are currently investigating new solutions such as having backup servers or internal servers so that we have better control over this technical element of the competition.
In regards to wireless, we understand that it is frustrating to have the wireless connection disconnect on occasion. We're looking into providing wired solutions next year so that we don't have to rely on the wireless network.
Closing
Another year is complete and there are now over 700 RITC alumni around the World. All that I can ask is that you remember your experience in Toronto and consider coming back either to participate as a competitor, faculty advisor, or sponsor in the future.
Kevin Mak
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