RIT Croatia students win at RIT's first inter-campus trading competition

December 21, 2021


With the aim to raise awareness about financial literacy and stock trading, students of RIT Dubai's Finance club organized RIT's First Inter-Campus Trading Competition with success!

The competition took place for seven weeks, from October 20, 2021 to December 5, 2021, during which students of RIT campuses in Dubai, Rochester and Croatia invested virtual money in different classes of securities like stocks, bonds, options, futures cryptos, and Forex. Grouped in teams of 2-4 members, students competed using the Stock Trak real-time trading platform which allowed them to invest and manage a virtual portfolio.

This is the first ever inter-campus trading competition at RIT and the fact that more than 20 teams from all campuses participated speaks of the interest students have in this topic: 8 teams came from RIT Dubai, 6 teams that competed came from the main campus in Rochester NY and 10 teams came from RIT Croatia.

Three teams from RIT Croatia achieved amazing results by winning in two out of three categories:

• The Three Musketeers, comprising of students Dino Poprženović, Arnes Poprženović, and Tarik Ceco, won the first place in the "Best 2 performance with enough trades" category
• Mind_the_GAAP, comprising of students Filip Veran, and Stipe Matković, won the first place in the "Passive portfolios and good performance" category
• Hakuna Matata, comprising of students Zaid Alkabani, Marko Golemović, and Viktor Čudoski, won the second place in the "Best 2 performance with enough trades" category

"As a freshman student I can say that this competitive experience has been nothing but positive. We as a team used every resource that we had on our disposition to make calculated decisions", says International Business student Viktor Čudoski. "We used articles from known journals to try to stay up-to-date with news, as well as consulting dedicated webpages which offer condensed information on earnings reports and other important economic reports and metrics. All that coupled with immense help from our mentor Prof. Vejzagić who held weekly lectures on different aspects of technical analysis. Those were extremely helpful when identifying trends, reading charts and acting accordingly to control the inherent risk every transaction has. I will most certainly continue to hone my investing and trading skills, use any resource that is offered here at RIT Croatia as well as complement them with any additional sources that are accessible. This competition deepened and widened my interest in the subject and has been an important formative experience."

"I feel that we all learned something by practicing trading in a low-risk environment with weekly support from our professor via zoom lecture", says student Marko Golemović. "I feel that this is a good way to apply theoretical knowledge from courses, and use this caution to see if our strategy could work in a real-time environment." Marko was the only Web ane Mobile Computing student from RIT Croatia participating in the competition, and there's a good reason to it. "My plan for the long-term future is to combine my IT knowledge and skills, and combine with technical and fundamental analysis to make better decisions, such as potentially predict the future movement of stocks. I would like to work in finance for some bank or hedge fund."

"I would like to use this opportunity to congratulate all of the students from all the campuses", says Dr Vanja Vejzagić who teaches finance related courses at RIT Croatia, and mentors students in our Investment club. "And I also wish to congratulate students from RIT Croatia, not only for winning, but for participating in this competition. Namely, the vast majority of them are freshmen and sophomore students, so their results are an even bigger achievement! I just had a Zoom meeting with all of them, and guess what - their main question was: Professor, what are we going to do over the break? We have some ideas we wanted to run by you. When I see such interest and passion in students, it makes me proud to be their professor and mentor".

Congratulations to all of the students!