Trading Competitions

The bp Canada Trading Competition is held in late September or early October depending on the start of fall classes.

bp Support

bp Canada assists us with the competition. It provided food (in years not impacted by a pandemic), as well as prizes for the top traders. Currently, they award prizes of $1000 for the top trader and $1000 prize for the top rookie. This latter prize brought out a strong cohort of rookies, which is very encouraging.

This competition uses our Haskayne license to the RIT software to simulate trading environments in stocks, commodities, futures and derivatives. The RIT software also has extensions to trade physical goods (crude oil, gasoline) as well as the assets used to manage these physical goods (storage, refineries and pipelines).

bp Canada uses this software for their own in-house training of traders and is kindly supplying the Haskayne Business School with the funding to acquire a license to use the RIT Software.

bp also sends some of their traders to observe the students, provide strategic and execution suggestions and to introduce them to aspects of the trading industry that they could find in their organization.

Competition is Open to All University of Calgary Students

The competition is sponsored by bp Canada and the Haskayne School of Business, but is open, to any University of Calgary student. We have had competitors from Haskayne, Engineering, Economics and several other Faculties.

bp Competition Cases and Support Documents

Currently the following four cases are used in the competition:

• Price Discovery 0, PD0. Traders use private information and combine it with public price information to make trading decisions.
• Commodities 1, COM1. Traders use public information on, supply and demand to trade crude oil to speculate on a futures contract.
• Contango, F2. Traders arbitrage price differentials in crude oil spot and futures contracts.
• Commodities 2, COM2. Traders use public information about storage and usage of natural gas to speculate on futures contracts that expire in July.

2024 Competition - September 28, 2024

The 2024 competition was held September 28, 2024.  Congratulations to Mayankjot Singh for his repeat win as top trader and to Alex Han as the top rookie trader.

The RITC is a worldwide trading competition hosted by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.  From the Rotman website:

“The Rotman International Trading Competition (RITC) is an annual event that brings teams of students and their faculty advisors from universities worldwide to participate in a unique 3-day simulated market challenge.

Teams are invited to participate in various activities including electronic and outcry trading cases, seminars with industry practitioners, and social events with their fellow competitors from around the world. In past years, RITC participants have competed in a diverse range of cases including open outcry, options, liquidity and algorithmic trading. Faculty advisors are invited not only to coach and observe their teams, but also to participate in various workshops on the Rotman Interactive Trader (RIT), the software used to run the competition.

RITC is consistently innovating, bringing new developments to its own competition with each successive year. Each year classic cases are re-vamped and new cases are added.

The competition has grown not just in scope, but also in international exposure. Last year, RITC hosted 52 teams from 52 different universities from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. The global representation grants a valuable opportunity for like-minded future finance professionals to meet their peers from across the globe. “

The teams for this event are selected based on trading performance and teamwork in weekly practices that commence prior to the bp Energy Trading Competition and continue through the WITC. The team is selected after the WITC.   At the start of the winter term practices are held weekly up to the competition which is held during the third week of February (Winter Reading Week).  A Gold and Red team are selected but we have only been able to send two teams once to in-person events. 

Practices are conducted using simulations on the RIT Server in the Lab.  Case files are modeled after cases that have been historically run at RITC.  In the week prior to the competition Rotman organizes practices that allow registered schools to compete against each to gain a sense of what that year's competition will include.

Historically markets were driven by open outcry sessions.  To be noticed traders wore bright colorful jackets.  Team Calgary members at RITC are readily identifiable by their Gold trading jackets. When we were able to send a second team they wore Red trading jackets to complement our school colors of red and gold.

We are very grateful for the assistance of bp Canada in acquiring a license to use the RIT Software for the September competition and subsequent practice. All the top teams at RITC trained on this software prior to the competition, so having the software was critical to our success.

2024 Competition - February 21-23, 2024

The 20th edition of the RITC will be held in-person in Toronto from February 21 - 23, 2024.  Our team finished in third place!  Forty two teams from 12 countries participated in the event. This is the seventh times in the last 11 years that we have finished in the top three.  

Western Invitational Trading Challenge (WITC)

The WITC started in 2016 as a trading competition for schools in western Canada that have licensed the RIT server.  Participants have included University of Alberta, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and the University of Calgary.  The in person competition was held over two days during the fall break.  The participants traded cases similar to those traded at RITC.  This event has been an important part of our RITC team selection process. 

In January 2024 we build on the success of the 2023 bp Competition and hold an in-person internal competition.  Simulations similar to what has been used at RITC will be run and the results, in conjunction with the 2023 bp Competition results, will be used to help determine the team for the 2024 RITC which will be held February 21-23, 2024, in-person in Toronto.