Students from the University of Colorado Denver Business School are competing for the first time in the annual CME Group Commodity Trading Challenge. The challenge pits teams from Universities around the world in a competition trading on Crude Oil, Gold and Corn Futures in, with teams compiling the greatest returns advancing to a championship round. This year’s competition includes 320 teams from 180 universities, including an undergraduate student team and two graduate student teams from the CU Denver Business School.The CU Denver undergraduate team is comprised of students who have expressed an interest in the commodities program at the Business School, while the two graduate teams from the business school consist of students from the Global Energy Management Program. The graduate teams are planning to place themselves in the winners’ circle by using compelling strategies for trading crude oil, one of the most-highly traded commodities in the world.

Student teams in the competition trade in a real-time on a professional trading platform provided by CQG, Inc. (a company headquartered in Denver). The competition aims to provide a realistic experience, with teams trading real commodities in real-time; it is only the money that teams trade with that is not real. Each team starts the preliminary round with a $100,000 balance with which to make trades, and teams whose returns are among the top ten percent of contestants move on to the championship round, where each teams begins with a balance of $250,000 in their trading account.

9News recently featured a story about one of the CU Denver Business School teams in their “Your Money Monday” segment. Watch the segment on  the 9news website, and includes a written article with more information about the competition and its sponsors.

For more information about the Commodities Program at the CU Denver Business School, visit the program’s homepage.

More information is available both from the Challenge’s homepage, as well as an article on OpenMarkets.