Team Black Pink, comprising of students Anita Chiaand Jorden Seet from School of Information Systems and Jaylen Li from School of Economics, has done SMU proud by coming up on top at the Singapore round of the 2019 International Quant Championship which was held on 13 July, becoming the first team from SMU to win the Singapore finals of this competition.

The team had earlier competed against more than 100 teams in the initial round to qualify for the Singapore finals, where only 10 teams qualified. Besides a cash reward of $4000, the team will represent Singapore at the global finals which will be held in Singapore in September where they will come up against 14 teams from other regions and stand a chance to walk away with US$20,000.

Organised by WorldQuant, a quantitative asset management firm, the team-based university competition is one of the largest quant competitions in the world. It offers participants the opportunity to learn more about quantitative finance by building quantitative predictive models using historical market data and predefined operators to simulate equity positions, assigning weights to securities based on a prediction of the expected returns in the next-defined time period.

Each qualifying quantitative predictive model is scored based on its performance against models submitted by the other contestants. The scores for each individual on a team are aggregated to produce a team score.

Jaylen explained that the team had entered the competition as they were curious about WorldQuant's websim technology, which allows one to blend coding with quantitative finance. As the competition progressed, the team learned more about this specialised field of finance. “For example, traditional financial indicators such as dividends, operating cashflow and yields often result in bad quantitative predictive models due to the overuse of such indicators by other market competitors. We thus had to rely on statistically significant, unconventional indicators to gain an edge over other contestants.”

The competition enabled the team to see more clearly the role that technology plays in quantitative finance. “A computer is not only able to calculate and price financial instruments much faster than human beings, it is also able to automate many manual processes, such as algorithm generation and statistical scraping. This shows the importance of being technology-savvy even as a quant,” added Jorden.

The competition also opened the eyes of the team to the various ways to derive quantitative insights in the financial markets. “Some took their inspiration from biological processes, some took their inspiration from thermodynamics, some from financial events and many more. It really shows that we are only limited by our own creativity and knowledge”, Anita enthused.

Caption: (L-R) Mr James Macarthur, CEO of WorldQuant Singapore, presented the top prize to the SMU team of Jorden Seet, Anita Chia and Jaylen Li. [Photo: WorldQuant Singapore]