Villanova School of Business Receives First Place Trophy in Foreign Currency Trading Competition

VILLANOVA, PA, 20 November 2007—Students in a Villanova School of Business (VSB) undergraduate derivatives class took first place in an October foreign currency trading competition at Texas A&M University. Twenty competing VSB students earned first place recognition for the team competition, and individual VSB students Jason Price, Eric Mueller, and Michael Ferrara ranked 4th, 5th, and 7th out of 120 students in the individual challenge.

The annual competition required students to trade foreign currencies on a simulated trading platform provided by an actual online currency brokerage company. “Given the real-world applications and technology that our VSB Applied Finance Lab affords students, our team maintained a competitive edge over the contenders,” says James Jablonski, VSB finance professor and coordinator of the Applied Finance Lab.

Among the other top performers were Penn State University, Texas A&M, and University of Toronto. The VSB team received the first place trophy from Texas A&M, and Price, Mueller, and Ferrara received prize money totaling close to $1,500.

Jablonski states, “This is an outstanding accomplishment, underscores the dedication and talent of our finance students.”

VSB serves over 2,500 students in 7 business fields and is ranked as the #12 undergraduate business program and #11 part-time MBA program in the nation by BusinessWeek. The school is home to the Institute for Research in Applied Financial Technology (IRAFT), which houses the VSB Applied Finance Lab. This state-of-the-art simulated trading floor provides undergraduate and graduate business students with the same real-time technology used by today’s Wall Street analysts. Due in large part to this innovative Applied Finance Lab, Villanova University is ranked the #1 most wired campus in the nation by PC Magazine and The Princeton Review.


FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Andrea Carter, Marketing & Public Relations
Villanova School of Business
Villanova University
800 Lancaster Avenue
Bartley Hall
610.519.6715
andrea.carter@villanova.edu