A team of students from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer recently won a Best Performance Award for their performance during the second half of the Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) Investment Challenge, an equity portfolio management competition.

The competition, held annually, challenges students to build and manage a portfolio under strict constraints, such as keeping it market neutral. With the support of a CQA mentor, students practice various investment strategies and make adjustments to their portfolios based on market conditions throughout the course of several months.

“This is the best possible experience students can get for learning the practice and discipline of investing and trading,” said Aparna Gupta, associate professor at Rensselaer and director of the Lally School’s Center for Financial Studies. “It becomes a context to apply not only their advanced skills in investment and data analysis, but also their leadership and teamwork skills.”

This year’s team from Rensselaer was comprised of quantitative finance and risk analytics students Alejandra Jaime Rodriguez, Jiaheng Liu, Justin Weinstein, Yiling Zou, and Yukun Sun.

“The entire experience was rewarding,” said Rodriguez. “We all learned so much about portfolio management, how the market works, how to do both quantitative and technical analysis, and, of course, how to work with others.”