Baruch College Again Dominates the Rotman International Trading Competition
Fifth straight year winning the world’s top student trading eventFebruary 29, 2024
From left to right: MFE students Shawn Roy, Gabriele Bernardino, Niccolo Fabri, Kevin Griffin, Gal Weitz, along with head coach Professor Jarrod Pickens, celebrate their victory and set an all-time scoring record.
For the fifth consecutive year, Baruch College students claimed victory at the preeminent Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC), besting teams from 40+ universities across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The winning team—Gabriele Bernardino, Niccolo Fabri, Keving Griffin, Shawn Roy, and Gal Weitz from the Master of Financial Engineering (MFE) program—won five of the six cases and set a new all-time scoring record at the February 21 event hosted by the University of Toronto. Jarrod Pickens, PhD, the team’s head coach, is a professor of mathematics at Baruch’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.
This year, the competition featured an innovative set of RIT Decision Cases—based on real-world conditions and delivered on the RIT Market Simulator platform—allowing teams to compete by identifying trading opportunities across a wide range of realistic simulated scenarios.
“This competition is incredibly rigorous and demands razor sharp skills, rapid but precise decision-making, and unshakeable confidence,” said Dan Stefanica, PhD, co-director of Baruch College’s Master of Financial Engineering program. “Like professional athletes, the Baruch team is well prepared and shows up to win every time.”
Stefanica added, “After winning this year’s competition, the first reaction of our students was that they now want to help prepare Baruch’s next team for the RITC in 2025. That’s the Baruch MFE team spirit.”
Unbroken Winning Streak
Baruch has claimed the top spot at RITC eight times, winning in-person competitions in 2012, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2024, as well as virtual competitions in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
This year’s RITC featured 200 student traders from 43 universities in 12 countries who participated in various simulated market challenges that include commodities, algorithmic forecasting trading, liquidity risk, electricity, and options trading.
The MFE program’s partner Virtu Financial sponsored the participation of our students at the RITC.
According to Stefanica, MFE students are actively recruited for careers as quant traders in such proprietary trading firms as IMC Trading, Virtu Financial, and CTC, or hedge funds including AXQ Capital, Citadel Securities, and Squarepoint Capital.
Learn more about Baruch College’s MFE program.
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