Twelve students were honored for being the first to complete the Trading, Risk and Investments Program (TRIP). They were recognized at the TRIP board meeting, held at Traditions Golf Course. Representatives from over 30 member companies enjoyed two days of student internship presentation and golf, capped off by a celebratory banquet.

Texas A&M Women’s Basketball Coach Gary Blair gave the keynote address.

The students recognized were Colin Schickedanz, Collin Coale, Corey Walter, Danielle Barski, Douglass Brown, Elizabeth Brumbaugh, Josh Groner, Kathryn Hoeffner, Kerr Friedman, Neil Azzam, Patrick Meyer and William Armstrong. The program director is Detlef Hallermann.

The WSJ surveyed 479 large U.S. companies, non-profits and governmental agencies to arrive at the rankings, which listed Texas A&M University 2nd among all schools. The study revealed that top public institutions were generally favored over Ivy League and other private institutions.

“The Journal research represents a systematic effort to assess colleges by surveying employers’ recruiters – who decide where to seek out new hires – instead of relying primarily on measures such as student test scores, college admission rates or graduates’ starting salaries,” noted Jennifer Merritt, the WSJ reporter who wrote the page-one story. She said in the article that recruiters’ perceptions “matter all the more given that employers today are visiting fewer schools, particularly due to the weak economy.”

Mays finance department head Sorin Sorescu says that the Aggie reputation for discipline and ethical behavior is well deserved and that’s something that recruiters recognize. “Our students are trained with a sense that a job worth doing is worth doing right. Once they go out into the workplace, they are likely to succeed…There are certain qualities that this university instills in them that are hard to teach elsewhere.”

Sorescu notes that the crisis in the financial sector in the past few years has dramatically altered the employment landscape for finance graduates—making this recruiting metric more significant. “In the past two years the needs of the marketplace have changed to demand more specialized skills such as how to value companies…manage portfolios, and manage risk.” The Mays program has responded by tailoring the curriculum to adapt to the needs of the marketplace, including practical classes in financial modeling, fixed income, and active portfolio management.

Mays students have the opportunity for hands-on lessons through the Tanner Fund, a portfolio managed by students for class credit, as well as the Reliant Energy Trading Center, which provides access to analytical tools and volumes of real-time and historical financial data.

Practical experiences in the classroom and in internships, paired with unique specialized offerings such as the Trading, Risk and Investments Program, produce graduates that have a marked competitive advantage when job hunting. “It really makes sense from an employer’s perspective to hire somebody who is already trained. It minimizes the search costs on the front end, and it minimizes training costs. It reduces risk that you may have made an error in hiring,” Sorescu says.

The competition took place in Toronto, Ontario, the heart of Canada’s financial district, February 18-20. Mays participant Corey Walter ’10 said that his team did not think they would place as well as they did, simply because most of their competitors were in MBA programs and had global work experience. The Mays team was comprised of undergraduates participating in the Certificate in Trading and Risk Management program (a five-year program which will yield both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in finance).

(L to R) Josh Groner ’10, Corey Walter ’10, Ben Huffman ’10, Neil Azzam ’11 and Director of Reliant Trading Programs Detlef Hallermann ’89

The competition involved real-world market scenarios and software, challenging students to use their knowledge of the market to make quick trading decisions and predict how stocks, bonds, indices and commodities would rise and fall. Teams faced off in five training simulations including credit risk, natural gas futures, equity brokerage, algorithmic trading, and quantitative analysis and outcry. Walter says that the Mays team won only three of the more than 20 heats, but they were consistently among the leaders.

“They were very surprised,” says team member Josh Groner ‘10, who noted a shift in his competitors’ opinion of the A&M team as the competition wore on. “No one expected us to perform as well as we did,” he says. “We definitely were the underdogs…it was a roller coaster weekend and feels great to have done so well.”

Walter and Groner credit the team’s success to the Certificate in Trading and Risk Management program. He says the industry professionals that lecture in a semester-long seminar class, representing companies such as Deutsche Bank, ConocoPhillips, and BP, provide valuable insight that gave them an advantage. Through the program, each of the students will also have three internships on different trading desks at board member companies. “The internship experience definitely helped us consistently finish at the top,” said Walter, commenting that each of the team members had completed at least one trade desk internship.

More than half of the universities that competed were from outside the United States. A further 20 percent were from outside North America, which gave the Mays team an opportunity to engage with a diverse group of students. Walter says that the team from Italy was very friendly and invited him to visit, which he intends to do next December. He says the experience in Canada has led him to more seriously consider working outside the U.S. after graduation.

Walter’s teammates were Neil Azzam ’11, Josh Groner ’10, and Ben Huffman ’10.

“Boy was that a good decision,” he says today, 23 years and billions of dollars in energy trades later. He recently visited Mays Business School to talk to finance students about how to manage a career in commodities trading.

“If you haven’t been humbled by the market yet, you will be…,” Phil Pace ’86 told students during a recent visit to Mays. “That’s how you learn.”

“The best traders know the business. You’d be amazed at how much money gets whipped around by people who don’t know an MCF from a barrel,” Pace told students as stock information flashed around the screens surrounding them in the Reliant Energy Securities and Commodities Trading Center. “You don’t want to be the guy or the gal who doesn’t know the difference between an MCF and a barrel.” Learn all you can about the business now, he told students, because your employers are probably not going to give you time to learn all the things you need to know to be great. Pace practices what he preaches, arriving at his office before dawn each day to read up on all of the business news from around the world.

“Know what you know. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Because you’re competing with people who do know,” he says, telling students that the market is brutal when it comes to flushing out people who don’t know what they’re doing.

“In this business, you cannot fake good performance and you cannot hide bad performance.”

Also, learn how to use Excel like a pro, he recommends. It’s an indispensible tool for analyzing the market. “You’re going to need every trick you can find” in Excel, as well as PowerPoint, because in this business, you’ll use it almost every day.

While Pace has had plenty of good days in his career—and has made a great living in oil and gas—there were plenty of bad days, too. Sometimes the stock you’ve been recommending goes from $35 to $10 per share in a day, “and you just want to crawl under a rock,” he says. But that’s the nature of high finance. “You will make disastrous mistakes. I promise. It will happen. You’ll step into something and shake your head and think ‘how did I get here?’” And that’s okay, as long as you can do two things:

1. Be humble. Own your mistake. “If you haven’t been humbled by the market yet, you will be…that’s how you learn,” he says.
2. Be logical and rational in your decision-making, so that when a stock blows up, you can defend your actions. “Be accountable to your ideas.”

“The measure of your success is how well you hold up when you make mistakes,” he told students. “Everyone is gracious in good times.”

Most of all, remember that trading is a business full of ups and downs—you might make a million one day, and lose two the next. You can’t let the market determine your level of happiness in life. Instead, you’ve got to find balance, separating work from the rest of your life and shrugging off the things that are beyond your control.

Pace has built a career as an analyst at several major banks such as Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Lehman Brothers, where he worked for one week before they went bankrupt. His experience at Lehman Brothers is part of what convinced him to start his own business with fellow Aggie business partner Robert Chambers ’89. “We decided not to tie ourselves to investment decisions made by people 1,000 miles away,” he said. Over a year ago, Pace “retired,” enjoying six months of leisure (an activity he’d hardly had time for previously) before joining Chambers in the start up investment venture Chambers Energy Capital, where he wears the title of managing director.

Despite his success, Pace hasn’t forgotten his roots, keeping active with Mays. Though he currently lives in The Woodlands, he hosted the Aggies on Wall Street group several times in NYC. In 2005, he and his wife Linda established a business excellence fund at Mays to support and enhance programs and opportunities in business.

Students from two local middle schools visited the Reliant Energy Trading Center as part of a field trip mark the end of a six-week course on personal finance and stock investment led by Mays students.

“It’s always good to have a diverse group of students coming in to tell them about college,” said Amanda Mann, a teacher at A&M Consolidated Middle School, one of two schools to participate. In addition to science, Mann also teaches the class that Mays students visited, the AVID class, or Advancement Via Individual Determination. Economically disadvantaged but academically gifted, many of the AVID students will be the first in their family to attend college. Mann hopes the class will prepare them for the rigors of advanced courses in high school that will propel them into college. Mann says that her students respond differently when she tells them they should start planning for college than when A&M students tell them the same thing: they take it more seriously when the Aggies say it.

The Mays course and stock contest was the brainchild of Brett Muller ’09, a Professional Program in Accounting with concentration in finance student. He had heard of a similar program at another university and was inspired to try organizing one at Mays himself—not for class credit, but because he wanted to do something that would help others. Muller led the team of Mays students as they prepared the lessons, presented each Wednesday at A&M Consolidated and College Station Middle Schools. His co-leader was Silvio Canto ’09, also in the Professional Program studying finance.

Part of the course focused on stock investing. Each of the middle school students followed a few stocks throughout the course to chart its gains and losses using www.updown.com. They had the opportunity to trade once a week. Muller says they didn’t get into financial statements or ratio analysis. Instead they instructed the middle schoolers to take a very common sense approach: “What products do you like? What company makes those products? Chances are if you like a product, somebody else is going to like it, too, and it will be a good investment.”

When they weren’t watching the DOW, the students were learning how to budget and save, how the economy affects them, and some very basic business etiquette, such as handshakes and phone calls.

Muller says he hoped the students would come to understand that business isn’t all stock swaps, it’s about every day investments. He held Warren Buffet up as an example, telling students about Buffet’s first investment when he was 14. He and a friend bought a pinball machine and placed it in a barbershop. Soon they had enough money to buy a few more machines. That lesson made sense to one participant, who, when asked what she learned through the course replied, “I learned that I should budget my money wisely and not spend it all so that I can be rich when I retire.”

“Interest is good for your savings,” another student added. “And make money, don’t spend it.”

The course concluded with a visit to Mays and a final lesson and awards ceremony in the Reliant Energy Securities and Commodities Trading Center.

“It was a ton of work and I’m glad it’s over, but I had a fantastic time doing it,” Muller said. “The kids were amazing…they exceeded my expectations in every way.”

Muller interned with PricewaterhouseCooper’s office in New York City in Spring 2009 and will return for a job when he graduates this December. Thanks to his connection to the firm, he was able to secure sponsorship from PwC, which provided prizes, tee shirts, and a pizza party for the 27 middle school participants.

“The competition gives students incredible hands-on experience,” said Detlef Hallermann, Director of the Reliant Energy Securities & Commodities Center and assistant clinical professor of finance, who organized the event.

Participating students each received an account with $50,000 of simulated capital to use for speculation in the forex market. Students had available to them all the same tools as professional traders, provided by GFT, a leading online forex dealing company that sponsored the event and provided the trading platform (DealBook® 360) that the students used to access the market.

Undergraduate and graduate students competed to earn the highest rate of return on their $50,000 account. Participating schools included: Texas A&M University, Penn State University, Villanova University, Oklahoma State University, University of Toronto, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Alberta, North Carolina A&T State University, Fairfield University, Siena College, Rollins College, Concordia University and China Europe International Business School. Villanova University won the overall competition, as their students as a team had the highest averaged return.

All students were required to keep a trade journal listing each trade placed, the reason for placing the trade and the result after closing out the trade. For many students, this journal was also part of a classroom grade, as many schools have incorporated the competition into their finance students’ curriculum.

Sethi, with his 78.64 percent rate of return, finished the competition with almost $90,000 of simulated capital in his account. For this success, he has received the grand prize of a $10,000 GFT account, which he can trade on for six months and keep any profits he makes. He also received a cash prize of $900 from BP and a private hedge fund, who were additional sponsors.

“This has opened a new door,” said Sethi, who is from the Dallas area. Prior to the competition, he had planned to study management, followed by law school, and then pursue a career as a sports agent. Now, he’s thinking finance is the way to go. “I had never even thought about trading before, and now I’m thinking about that for a career,” he said.

Sethi is excited about his $10,000 account with GFT. “If I get lucky and it’s like last time…I turned $50,000 into about $90,000 within a month. Just something like that in six months would be amazing. But I’d be happy with any kind of gain,” he said.

He acknowledges that luck has a lot to do with his success. “I tried to follow the trends and use the past to predict the future…I just got a little lucky and caught the right trends,” he said.

About GFT

Founded in 1997, Global Forex Trading (GFT) is a world-leading provider of real-time currency dealing, pricing and comprehensive services for retail and institutional foreign exchange traders. GFT has served a global customer base in more than 120 countries through its DealBook® 360, DealBook® WEB and DealBook® Mobile trading software and 24–hour dealing desk operation. The company’s world headquarters is based in Ada, Mich., with global offices located in Chicago, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Australia and London (London office operated through GFT Global Markets UK Ltd.).

GFT adheres to strict regulatory guidelines and principles of integrity, and is a member of the National Futures Association (NFA) and is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the United States. Globally, GFT is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) in Australia, the Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA) in Japan, and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the U.K. More information about GFT can be found at www.gftforex.com/?aid=412.

About Mays Business School

Mays Business School currently enrolls more than 4,000 undergraduate students and 875 graduate students. Mays is nationally ranked among public business schools for the quality of its undergraduate program, MBA program and the faculty scholarship of its 110 professors in five departments.

Though she and a partner finished with a loss in the trading competition hosted by BP at Mays, Goodwin brimmed with enthusiasm about the experience. “This is for me,” she announced. “I definitely want to have a future in investments and trading.”

That’s just the kind of thing recruiters for BP’s energy trading floor want to hear. For the second year, BP returned to the Reliant Energy Securities and Commodities Trading Center in search of talented students who have an interest in energy trading. BP’s purpose is three-fold: “To expose students to the energy trading business, let them see who we are and what we do, and to see if there are any talented students for future consideration in our trader development program,” says Tami Joslin, BP’s graduate recruiting manager for its North American gas and power business unit based in Houston.

The internal recruiting competition at Mays’ Reliant Energy Securities and Commodities Trading Center was the first of its kind for BP last year. Returning in 2007 with a more sophisticated trading simulator, BP also added recruiting competition stops at the University of Texas, Rice and the University of Oklahoma.

In this February’s BP competition, 90 business students—mostly freshmen and sophomores—executed simulated natural gas futures trades based on mock news feeds that typically influence trading behavior in the energy sector. In hour-long sessions in three separate rounds, students traded contracts based on the relevance of the news, such as a familiar scenario in which a hurricane is threatening oil production in the Gulf Coast.

Overall winners were sophomore Chris Martin, who took first, and the teams of junior finance major Steve Teng and sophomore Kelly Corley (second) and junior accounting majors Natalie Minshew andStephanie Coco (third).

Finance students at Mays are already being trained for the type of securities and commodities trading that happens at BP, Joslin noted. “The finance program is so strong,” Joslin said. “We know these students are being exposed to what we do on a daily basis.”

The big picture for Mays professors is not only showcasing the best students to BP. It’s also about sparking an early interest in trading as a career, says Detlef Hallermann, program leader for the Reliant Energy Securities and Commodities Trading Center at Mays. “Competitions like this provide these students with the ability to understand trading and what it takes to become a trader,” Hallermann said. “In a one-hour simulation they get to get a feel for what it’s like to lose $1 million. They know then if they can handle the stress and joy of being a trader.”