12 May 2020

2020 Investment Challenge: the winners

The first edition of Investment Challenge was a success! The online challenge launched by Banca Generali together with Reply and MIP Politecnico di Milano has bring students closer to the world of finance and asset management, ended with an entirely Italian podium. Here are the three winners:

• Alfonso Di Palma: 22 years old, affiliate a third year of the faculty of Economics and Commerce in Naples, ranked number one with profits of € 212.080;
• Giuseppe Michele Rinaldi: 22 years old, affiliate a third year of the faculty of Management in Trento, ranked second place with profits of € 151.024;
• Bruno Messina: 23 years old, with a degree in Big Data and Business Analytics and MSc in Marketing Managementp of Bocconi University, ranked third place with profits of € 125.733.

The winners stood out in a new financial format, which between March and April saw over 8,500 members compete from all Europe with the aim of protecting the initial endowment of 1 million Euros (demo) and maximizing profits by hedging and risk management strategies following the real developments of the financial markets. A challenge that has become extremely interesting also due to the volatility of the financial markets affected by Covid-19 emergency.

The students participated in 207 thousand hours of trading (equal to 23.6 years) on the BG Saxo Trader Go platform, with profits (always virtual) generated of 220 million euros against a total volume of over 170,000 trading operations.

The Investment Challenge was also characterized by the e-learning: in the first phase, participants had the opportunity to improve their knowledge of financial instruments by exclusive e-learning content created by Reply, Banca Generali and MIP - Politecnico di Milano: more than 220 financial glossary entries, more than 8 hours in total of videos produced in pill and live-streaming format and over 300 social media contents.

At the end of the final round, each student produced a report to support and clarify the strategy adopted. This allowed the jury of the competition - made up of Banca Generali's CEO, Gian Maria Mossa, Reply's Executive Partner, Roberto Tognoni, MIP's Senior Professor of Finance, Marco Giorgino and the CEO of BG Saxo, Gian Paolo Bazzani - to evaluate the practical results by appointing a podium of three young traders under 23.

CEO's COMMENT

"We are excited about the results of this first edition of the Investment Challenge which go beyond our expectations. Our goal was to bring students closer to the concept of risk on the markets, helping them to familiarize with the main financial instruments and to decline them with a protective logic on private assets. I want to congratulate Alfonso, Giuseppe Michele and Bruno who managed to excel among the more than 8 thousand members, best describing the concept of protection in an exceptional context of the markets, characterized by strong volatility due to the Covid-19 crisis".