{"id":43662,"date":"2016-04-12T02:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T07:00:44","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-04-12T02:00:44","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T07:00:44","slug":"students-experience-with-commodity-trading-translates-into-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/12\/students-experience-with-commodity-trading-translates-into-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Students\u2019 Experience with Commodity Trading Translates into Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a TT CampusConnect<\/a>\u2122<\/sup> partner school since 2014. Sheldon Du, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, uses both the X_TRADER<\/a>\u00ae<\/sup> and TT<\/a>\u00ae<\/sup> platforms in his Commodity Markets class to help students understand the concept of managing price risk. Read on to learn more about Professor Du, his class and how it\u2019s preparing his students for careers in the commodity markets.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"From
\nFrom left to right, trading team members Jackson Remer, Brad Jaeger, Carly Edge, Cory Epprecht, Sam Seid, and Professor Sheldon Du. Not pictured: Nicholas Barber and Hannah Fritsch.<\/em>Using real-world commodity-trading software and armed with simulated trading experience in agricultural markets, some University of Wisconsin-Madison students are finding paths to jobs after graduation.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe prepare students by providing the knowledge of the trading software used by professionals and an understanding of how these sometimes-volatile markets work in real time,\u201d says Sheldon Du, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Du says that the market for Agricultural Business Management majors is promising, and students\u2019 experience with professional software platforms and hands-on simulated commodity trading makes them more attractive job candidates.<\/p>\n

Du has taught his spring undergraduate class, Commodity Markets, since 2012. His students learn about economic concepts related to commodity futures and options contracts, pricing mechanisms, and principles and techniques for using derivatives to hedge price risk. They also learn about commodity trading, wherein futures contracts of commodities\u2014such as grains, dairy products and energy\u2014are bought and sold through organized exchanges to generate returns or to manage price risks.<\/p>\n

Last year, Du\u2014with the enthusiastic backing of his department\u2014applied for and received a grant from UW-Madison\u2019s Educational Innovation initiative<\/a> to expand the class experience to include an optional 10 weeks of training during the following fall on technical analysis using X\u00ad_TRADER software, a professional trading platform that was donated to the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in 2014 by Trading Technologies International, Inc. The school has since migrated to Trading Technologies\u2019 new TT\u00ae platform, which became commercially available in 2015.<\/p>\n

Students can also choose to go on to compete in the CME Group Trading Challenge, a simulated trading competition, which pits hundreds of college teams from around the world against one another in as they make real-time commodity trading decisions. Du\u2019s students first participated in the event in late winter 2015 and then again this year.<\/p>\n

Competing in the challenge requires students to use electronic trading software to execute trades on the CME Globex trading platform, providing students added experience with real-world tools and techniques. This spring, seven UW-Madison students on two teams took part in the competition.<\/p>\n

Andrew Berger, who was on one of two trading teams last year, went on to become a risk analyst for Henning and Carey Technologies in Chicago after graduating in May 2015.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fundamental knowledge that I gained about futures and options contracts, hedging techniques and financial market analysis prepared me well for the interview,\u201d says Berger, who returned to campus this spring to speak to Du\u2019s students.<\/p>\n

Jackson Remer, a UW-Madison senior who just finished his second competition as leader of one of two teams, says the experience has been invaluable.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has exposed me to the meat and potatoes of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I have gained an understanding of the markets it trades, what affects them fundamentally and about the technical indicators traders utilize,\u201d says Remer. \u201cI have been able to use this group as a talking point in every job interview.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brad Jaeger, a senior who just landed a post-graduation job as a grain merchandiser at Wisconsin\u2019s Country Visions Cooperative, says his two years of competing in the challenge, plus the academic grounding he received, were instrumental in launching his career.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Jaeger worked as a grain merchandising intern at CHS Inc. in Minnesota, which \u201csnowballed into the experience I needed to get a full-time job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe learned fundamental analysis, and although we never advanced in the trading competition, we received a lot of great live trading experience,\u201d adds Jaeger, who led the other UW-Madison team this year.<\/p>\n

Facing competition from 468 other teams, including prominent business school teams from around the world, UW-Madison\u2019s teams finished 86th and 252nd in this year\u2019s preliminary round of the competition. Only the top 50 teams advanced to the championship round.<\/p>\n

Du says that exposing students to the theory of commodity markets, along with practical trading situations and tools helps them get a taste for the profession and the experience to impress prospective employers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am always looking for ways to increase the trading component, which is important for students\u2019 understanding of the markets,\u201d says Du. \u201cIt\u2019s also important for their professional futures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note: This post was originally published on the University of Wisconsin-Madison website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a TT CampusConnect\u2122 partner school since 2014. Sheldon Du, an assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, uses both the X_TRADER\u00ae and TT\u00ae platforms in his Commodity Markets class to help students understand the concept of managing price risk. Read on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-43662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tt-campusconnect"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradingtechnologies.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}