The dealers at Scottish Widows cemented their reputation as smart traders by winning the Goldman Sachs trading game at the Trade Tech Equities conference for a second year in a row.
Scottish Widow’s pan-European equities dealer, Iain Havard, beat rivals from Northern Trust, State Street Global Advisers, JPMorgan Fleming, ABP and Principal Global Investments to win first prize in the competition, a place on the WBR competition yacht. Competitors were allowed to put up to a maximum of $10 million long and $10 million short on any of the stocks traded on Goldman’s RediPlus platform. Individual positions were not allowed to exceed $10 million and the maximum order size was 100,000 shares.
Havard’s winning strategy was to short Vivendi and Saint-Gobain but go long Svenska Handelsbank. “I just did what I do every day,” says Havard. “I looked for stocks I knew well and which had moved particularly hard that day and took a position.”
Goldman Sachs changed the format of the competition this year from last year’s “five hours to make a million” after last year’s winner, Havard’s colleague Brian Heller, beat the competition by making “just” $45,000.