J.P. Morgan Names Grand Prize Winner of FantasyFutures Trading Game

Cornell Graduate Student Claims U.S. Grand Prize in Simulated Trading Competition

J.P. Morgan announced today that Duncan Wong, a second year graduate student in Financial Engineering at Cornell University, claimed the top U.S. prize for the Investment Bank’s FantasyFutures game.  Wong won an expense-paid trip to J.P. Morgan’s London trading floor by earning the greatest overall profit among over 2,500 participating students in the fall 2007 U.S. competition. He will also join the U.S. weekly winners of FantasyFutures for dinner with senior traders and a day spent at J.P. Morgan’s New York office.In Europe, Li Li, a fourth-year student at the London School of Economics, was the grand prize winner, and Liu Chengzheng, a bioengineering student at Nanyang Technological University, won the Asia Pacific competition.

J.P. Morgan’s FantasyFutures, the nine-week online interactive trading simulation game, launched in spring 2006, and has attracted students eager to gain hands-on experience in financial trading. To play, students use “fantasy” money to create and manage simulated trading accounts where they take a view on interest rate moves in the global markets.  The fall 2007 contest was the first time the game was conducted globally with more than 9,000 students in separate U.S., Asia and Europe competitions. FantasyFutures will take place again in spring 2008.

“This was a very good learning experience,” said Wong, who executed 1,159 total trades during the contest. “After playing this game for two months, I definitely understand how the money market reacts to the news. I had to make sure I had the latest information from the U.S., Eurozone and UK markets before every trading session. Now, I get to see the real thing–on the trading floors in New York and London.”

U.S. Weekly Winners include:
Week 1: Qian Yao, Senior, Cornell University, Operations Research and Information Engineering
Week 2: Phuong Arielle Nguyen, Junior, Mount Holyoke College, Mathematics-Economics
Week 3: Kyle Walsh, Senior, Penn State University, Energy Business and Finance
Week 4: Xiaojiang Liu, First-year graduate student, Cornell University, Financial Engineering
Week 5: Mike Chen, Junior, University of Michigan, Finance
Week 6: Glauber Mosque, Sophomore, University of Pennsylvania, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
Week 7: Duncan Wong, Second-year graduate student, Cornell University, Financial Engineering
Week 8: Ming Zheng, First-year graduate student, Cornell University, Financial Engineering
Week 9: Yufei Wang, Second-year graduate student, Cornell University, Electrical Engineering

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