Kean University Team Reaches Top 25 in International Stock Trading Competition

Two graduating Kean University business students will head into the future with resumes boosted by a strong showing in an international stock trading competition conducted by Bloomberg L.P.

They were members of a three-student team that placed in the top 5% out of nearly 500 teams from the U.S. and around the world in the Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge. It was the first time Kean teams entered the competition.

The team from Kean’s College of Business and Public Management (CBPM) used Bloomberg Terminal technology to do simulated stock market trading over several weeks this year. 

The Class of 2022’s Zhangliang “Jason” Pan, of Wenzhou, China, and Antonio Henriquez of Carteret, partnered with Robin Edelmann, an exchange student from Germany. They placed 22nd in the competition on the strength of virtual investments in stocks such as Tesla, Apple and Amazon.

“It’s real experience,” said Pan, a finance major who spent one year at Wenzhou-Kean University, then three at Kean in Union. After graduation, he will pursue his master’s degree at the University of Rochester. 

Kean Assistant Professor Qian Mao, Ph.D., was advisor to the Kean team, one of four from CBPM to compete. She said the students picked stocks based on market conditions, closely monitored risks and kept their portfolio diversified across industry sectors and countries.

“CBPM has been ahead of the curve in providing our students with cutting-edge knowledge and skills and preparing them for future success,” she said. “Our goal is to engage students in opportunities to learn through doing and to reflect on those activities, which empowers them to be successful in and outside of the classroom.”

Global Trading Challenge teams start with a virtual $1 million to invest and use Bloomberg Terminals to define market assumptions, develop a return-generating strategy, and execute trades over a closed network. The winner is the team with the highest relative profit and loss, relative to the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Price Return Index (WLS Index). 

Competing teams came from the University of Chicago, Duke University, Johns Hopkins and locally, Rutgers, Stevens Institute of Technology and The College of New Jersey. 

Edelmann, a finance major who was captain of the team, said the role “gave me an exposure of being in charge to meet investment decisions. 

“Gathering and evaluating information and bringing my own ideas as well as ideas of team members together is hard to manage,” he said. “But being in charge when there is no real money involved releases some pressure.” 

With two of the team members hailing from overseas, the CBPM group had some helpful international knowledge. Edelmann said one of the team’s investments was in the German airline Lufthansa.

“It was a company struggling due to Covid. They performed extremely well due to their capacities and the rising prices in the global economy,” he said. “Further, we were pretty sure that the German government would avoid letting Lufthansa fail.”

Henriquez, is a management/entrepreneurship major, and will also graduate this week.