SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY (SKKU), SEOUL, KOREA

Jaewon Moon, Chiseung Ahn, and Joonhyuk Jeong (Team name: Gangnam Billionaire Association, GBA), in the Department of Global Business Administration, won the Top 5 Finalist award at the Southeastern Hedge Fund Competition on April 23 (Fri). It is the largest quant hedge fund contest, where university students participate.

It is the competition where hedge fund managers evaluate students' new quant investment ideas and backtest results. Students won the first place for their final project of a class, 'Current Topics in Finance' with the topic of 'Data Science in Finance and Hedge Fund', taught by Prof. Younghan Kim and Adjunct Prof. Hyungkyu Choi in Fall 2020.

In the preliminary competition, students from 28 prestigious universities such as London Business School, University of Texas at Austin, UNC Chapel Hill, Indiana University, University of St. Gallen in Swiss, and etc. At the final competition, Ph.D. students of LBS won the first place, students of University of Texas at Austin won the second place, M.A. students of UNC Chapel Hill won the third place, and students of SKKU and University of St. Gallen won the Finalist awards. Although students of SKKU are undergraduate students, they showed their abilities and stood shoulder to shoulder with M.A. and Ph.D. students.

The over-reaction strategy, proposed by students, has advanced the existing stock market's overreaction to suit high-frequency trading hedge funds and has been praised for its originality of capturing investment opportunity using big data by trading group that can only be secured in Korean market.

Before the presentation, students had a special training by Prof. Joseph Kim in SKK Business School in order to increase their presentation skills in English. In addition, they practiced presentation and Q&A with quant fund managers working in Hong Kong, including Dr. Chang-hwan Sung and Daeyoung Lee.

Due to the COVID-19, the students were not able to be in the U.S. physically, however, they still could meet talents from around the world through ZOOM, compete for ideas, and expand insights through direct advice from the U.S. quant hedge fund managers.