Five Merrimack College freshmen traded their way to the top of the 2022 Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge.
The students – Sean Foster ‘26, Azariah Ehtesham ‘26, Ryan Barthelmess ‘26, Christopher Cappuccio ‘26 and Ryan Davis ‘26 – banded together as Team Bloomburgers in this year’s competition in New York City. Together, they placed No. 9 globally and third in North America.
Mary Papazian, managing director of Merrimack’s Mucci Capital Markets Lab, first introduced the competition to the College last year.
“It truly is amazing to see a group of students work together while learning new technologies and collaborating on strategies to beat the market and place in the top 10 internationally,” she said. “I am very proud of these students and look forward to seeing them advance their skill set over the next few years at Merrimack.”
Global Trading Challenge contenders have a month to outperform the Bloomberg World Large, Mid and Small Cap Index using Bloomberg Terminal software and a starting amount of $1 million. By the end, Team Bloomburgers earned $221,937, clearing the benchmark by $148,796.
“I would say my favorite part of the competition was getting hands-on experience with the terminals after getting my certification,” said Foster. “It allowed me to recognize the capabilities of the terminal within a practical scenario.”
The team’s strategy involved betting on companies’ upcoming earnings calls and investing in stocks they believed would bounce off a strong earnings report. They also learned new Bloomberg functions, like Relative Strength Index, to make their investment decisions. The RSI function shows whether a stock is overbought or oversold, which lets investors know if it is a good time to buy a stock or not.
“What I learned from the experience is it is important to not only see how well a stock or company is doing but how well it is doing compared to a major index such as the S&P 500 or in the case of the competition, the WLS Index,” said Barthelmess.
Ehtesham learned not to get discouraged by losses, because “your biggest losses can be followed by your biggest gains…even though it’s extremely discouraging to lose money, you’ve got to keep at it.”
