Navigating the Waves of the Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge: The DCU Team’s Journey

Over 2,400 teams from around the globe participated in the 2024 annual Bloomberg Trading Challenge which allowed teams to utilise real-world, real-time financial tools to develop an investment strategy, research high-potential stocks, and prove their trading skills.

DCU Business School students from the MSc in Finance entered the competition where they were given a hypothetical $1M to invest on a closed network over the eight-week challenge, using investing principles they learned in the classroom and applying them daily in an intense, exciting competition.

The team give us a first-hand account of what that experience was like:

The Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge is an exhilarating and formidable annual competition that draws teams of eager students from around the world, each vying to master the art of real-world investing. This prestigious event pits teams against each other, using Bloomberg’s terminal to define market assumptions, develop a return-generating strategy, and execute trades within a closed network, and aim for the highest time-weighted relative return, benchmarked against the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Price Return Index (WLS Index).

This year, we the ‘DCU Bulls’, (Ajith Mohan, Dibin Joy, Manogna M, Sidhant Raghav and Vishnu Vardhan) entered the competition with an exhilarating mix of excitement, nervousness, pressure and motivation. With a mixed bag experience of accounting, finance, audit and credit analysis, we stood on the massive doors of the quintessential trading giant’s realm for the grand competition which had 2,520 teams competing from 396 Universities and Schools, in 46 countries, and with 13,029 participants!

We knew early on the need for learning what none of us had prior experience with and we began the week leading up to the competition, huddling over the terminal, learning the elements of the TMSG window (the platform for the competition) and boring our heads into a thin copy of “Trading for dummies”. But in the warm embrace of meeting familiar faces at the start of a new semester, this passed by in a quick breeze and on October 7^th 2024, we found ourselves facing the very beast we were meant to tame – real-world investing. The competition began without much fanfare, and we dipped our feet in the pool, cautiously investing only 20% of our allowed capital, the minimum needed to remain active. We were keenly aware that real-world investing was starkly different from classroom simulations and wanted to first gauge the competition’s landscape before fully committing.

But as the weeks unfolded, we adopted a multi-pronged strategy. We had known early on the importance of following relevant company news and market sentiment. Dibin and Manogna scoured for key company news and stock movements, while Sidhant and Vishnu and I (Ajith) focused on the technical analysis, setting the stage for our initial moves. We paid close attention to financial report announcement dates, strategically moving funds to capitalize on post-earnings release price movements before reallocating to anticipate the next set of reports. Simultaneously, we ventured into investments in top-performing stocks like MSTR, TSLA, and DJT, influenced by market sentiment and company news. We especially kept a close eye on the US elections and tracked down the candidate PAC investors to see potential possibilities of upward moving stocks. Though this did not yield significant results we quickly noticed companies associated with Donald Trump directly, like DJT performing really well on the back of election expectations. Although not all bets paid off as expected, we saw relatively strong P&L movements offset only by a few incorrect bets.

The entire experience was a journey of discovery and upskilling for us as we gradually acquired and honed new trading skills. Our research unfolded an array of technical trend patterns such as head and shoulders, double tops and bottoms, cups and handles, and flags. We initially allocated a small portion of our capital to these identified trends cautiously – to evaluate their viability and began exploring the differences between bullish and bearish patterns. We also scrutinized significant price jump movements, and probed their underlying causes. Observing greater success from these strategies, we gradually redirected larger shares of our capital towards these indicators. We also integrated advanced technical patterns like the golden cross into our strategy. This approach, backed by continued rigorous analyses involving Bollinger bands, RSI, trading volumes, and candlestick patterns, became a cornerstone of our trading strategy. This method not only enhanced our tactical framework but also significantly propelled our success, evidencing the power of strategic technical analysis in real-world trading.

But no story is complete without its lesson, and despite our strategies and insights, the challenge also underscored our limitations. We realized that accurately forecasting market trends was merely half the battle; the true challenge lay in the precise timing of entering and exiting trades based on our analysis. This required vigilant daily monitoring, a commitment that became increasingly difficult to uphold as we navigated the demands of our second semester and ongoing dissertation work. Compounded by the necessities of part-time jobs to sustain ourselves and the relentless pace of assignments, tests, and dissertation deadlines, we were stretched thin and we struggled to synchronize our schedules to return to the trading desk and monitor the movements of stocks.

As a result, we did not always manage to close our positions at the predetermined or optimal times. On occasions when we did manage to exit a trade successfully, finding the time to analyse and initiate new trades was another hurdle. Our ex-ante analysis confirmed that our understanding of the trends was accurate; but our challenge had been consistently being present to act on this knowledge. This chronic lack of time meant that we remained underinvested, relying heavily on the strength of our initial analysis to maintain profitability. This teaching us very quickly that while making profits trading was indeed possible, it made massive demands in the form of time and effort, and we believe to this day that this essentially was the purpose of the challenge- to teach that investing is hard.

With this challenge, we learned the most basic and crucial of all lessons, in life as in trading; knowing is only half the battle, timely action is the rest. While we are immensely proud to have finished in the top quartile of this competition, yet for us five, the greater triumph lies in the invaluable lessons we absorbed throughout the journey – the first-hand exposure to real-time trading, and the considerable boost in confidence we gained from the experience.

Apart from learning to leverage our skills and aptitude to strategically pursue high-performing stocks, we gained a deep appreciation for the rigorous demands of trading and the reality that not all investments yield expected returns. And like all things this year at DCU, we came to understand that success in trading often involves resilience—the ability to return to the trading desk, draw lessons from our setbacks, and refine our strategies for victory.

For more information about the MSc in Finance please visit: business.dcu.ie/course/finance/