Haas Team Takes Victory in Lehman Brothers Financial Engineering Competition
Pictured from left to right:
Kevin Yang (MFE 06), Prof. Richard Stanton, Jiakai Chen (MFE 06),
Prof. Nancy Wallace, Ran Liu (MFE 06), Vasco Ribeiro (MFE06), and Michael Eberhardt (MBA 06)
April 10, 2006
The Haas School team of four MFE students and one Berkeley MBA student won the ninth Annual Graduate Business School Financial Engineering Competition held at Lehman Brothers in New York City this past weekend.
The team -- Jiakai Chen, MFE 06; Ran Liu, MFE 06; Vasco Ribeiro, MFE 06; Kevin Yang, MFE 06, and Michael Eberhardt, MBA 06-- defeated competitors from four of the nation's top MBA programs: Wharton, Chicago, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon. Professors Richard Stanton and Nancy Wallace served as the team's faculty supervisors.
"All the teams did well with the case solution, but the Haas team stood out in the way it explained the rationale for its solution and by the balanced contribution from the five team members to the presentation and the judges' questions," says John O'Brien, executive director of the Master's in Financial Engineering (MFE) Program. "This is characteristic of the Haas teams through the years -- a tribute to the quality of the students, their finance training, the stress on teamwork, and the very effective coaching of Professors Stanton and Wallace."
This is the fourth win for Haas in the nine competitions held to date, and it is the third win in just the last four years. No second place was awarded this year. According to O'Brien, the head judge said the overall team quality was very high, but there was one distinction: Haas and all the rest.
"This year's case was by far the most technically complicated of the cases we have done," said Professor Stanton. "It involved an interest rate derivative and we had to worry about interest rates in more than one country as well as foreign exchange movements. Our students had by far the best combination of a professional and polished presentation and being able to handle the technical aspects of the case."
The competition is sponsored by Appaloosa Management Partners, L.P. and Lehman Brothers, and is organized by Carnegie Mellon University and Lehman Brothers Fixed Income Research.
