Year 11

The WGHS Investment Competition is an Investment Competition held by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Global youth program. Students must form teams and create their own proprietary investment strategy that best fits a hypothetical client; this year’s client is Nichole Jordan, a Wharton MBA alumni. Teams are given ten weeks to trade $100,000.00 using WInS, Wharton’s proprietary trading simulator. In this year’s competition, over 1300 teams competed in the competition. The top 50 teams, regardless of region, are selected to join the semifinals based on their final reports—a document detailing their investment strategies. Semifinalists must submit a video presentation of their respective investment strategies. The top 10 teams in the semifinals are then selected to go to the Global Finale in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and present their investment strategies live to a panel of judges. This year’s judges include Andrea Vitorelli, Global Chairman of J.P. Morgan Financial Institutions Group’s Insurance Group; Muk Rao, Product Manager and Architect at Wharton Research Data Services; Joseph Rava, CFA, Investment Analyst, Aberdeen Standard Investments; John J. Zaia, Senior Vice President, Citi Wealth Management.

In this year’s competition, a team from Global Jaya made it to the WGHS Investment Competition Global Finale, the first team from Indonesia in the history of the competition to have made it to do so. The team in question is Wu-Tang Capital, a band of Y11 students from Global Jaya with a passion for investing and data analysis.

When asked what makes their investment strategy unique and the secret to their success, the team replied, “In developing an investment strategy for this year’s competition, we have decided to use a top-down quantamental approach that utilizes tools like machine learning to make forecasts for financial indicators and specially designed algorithms to size our investments and hedge against downside risk.”

Needless to say, the team had to exert a sizable amount of effort into the competition, and they encountered many trials and tribulations. “During the competition, we have pulled countless all-nighters that involve us troubleshooting our algorithms and predictive models, producing forecasts, submitting buy orders, writing our final report, or developing our pitch.” Even so, the team says that the lessons learned from the competition are well worth the effort. “Overall, we think that the competition has given us invaluable insights into the world of finance. However, more importantly, we have learned necessary transferable skills that we can use regardless of what career path we would traverse in the future. These skills include panache, teamwork, and effective communication.” says the team.

Positive School Environment: Being Compassionate.

As we look to embrace the summer break with happiness and enthusiasm, in Uvalde, Texas, USA, a shooting incident killed 19 elementary students and two teachers of the Robb Elementary School on Tuesday, May 24th, 2022. According to the Washington Post (Klemko et al.), the shooter, Salvador Ramos, 18-years-old, was known as a quiet teenager who had been bullied due to his speech impediment and problematic family background. This is not the first time that a mass shooting has happened in the school context and my saddened heart wonders about the proactive and preventative steps that schools around the world can take.

Mental health and well-being are real things and it takes the whole community, working hand in hand, to build a positive environment that is built on the tenets of compassion, inclusion and safety..

You have people ready to assist you.” Be compassionate to yourself knowing that we cannot be perfect all the time. Accept that failure is a chance to bounce back and we that we all make mistakes - failure provides us with an opportunity to learn from the choices we make. Sometimes, it is okay not to be okay.

Work Cited

Klemko, Robert, et al. “Uvalde, Texas, gunman was increasingly troubled and violent, friends say.” The Washington Post, 25 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-gunman/. Accessed 1 June 2022.