Duncan Wong, who will complete his financial engineering studies at the end of the year, beat out 2500 students in the United States to become the US Grand Prize Winner in the JP Morgan FantasyFutures competition.
The JP Morgan FantasyFutures game provides each contestant with a simulated futures trading account and lets them write interest rates futures contracts to capture profits from interest rate moves within the global marketplace. Duncan Wong, who came to Cornell from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, had the highest profit of all of the US participants in week seven of the eight week competition, which turned out to be the highest profit for the entire US competition.
Wong is currently doing a summer internship in Asia, following two semesters in Ithaca learning the mathematical, computational and business aspects of financial engineering. He will return to Cornell in the fall to complete the third semester of the Financial Engineering Master's Program at Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM), ORIE's Wall Street facility.
As his international Grand Prize, Wong chose to visit JPMorgan’s headquarters in London. Wong also participated in a day-in-bank at JPMorgan’s global headquarters in New York City. He found that “the experiences of visiting the trading floor of JPMorgan Headquarters on another continent and meeting the top traders around the globe are invaluable, especially for someone who wants to engage in trading as his career.”
Wong said that his time in the Cornell Financial Engineering Program is "one of the highlights in my career." "The quality of the faculty and peers, together with the well-balanced program curriculum, help me understand both the theoretical and practical knowledge in the financial industry," he said.
In striving to win the competition, Wong said his "strategy was to read the news that may affect the market expectation on US, Euro Zone and UK interest rate movement before each trading session in this competition. I also kept an eye on price movement of bonds in these regions.” In addition to Wong as the US International Grand Prize Winners, there was one winner from each of Europe and Asia Pacific.
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