Students go through to the semi-finals of the London Institute of Banking & Finance’s Student Investor Challenge

Callum, Charlie, Ollie and Oscar’s successful entry through to the semi-finals means that they were in the top 10% of the 6,414 teams who entered nationally.

The competition involves teams investing two £100,000 pots of virtual money in a set of stocks and other investment instruments from a list of designated FTSE100 companies, the smallCap50 and a list of specially selected exchange traded funds (ETFs), the prices of which follow the London Stock Exchange.

The two pots are an ‘Active Investment Portfolio’, which allows daily trading, and a ‘Strategic Investment Portfolio’, which only allows a limited number of trades per month. Over the four month period, the boys increased the value of their Strategic Investment Portfolio to £110,508.40, and the value of their Active Investment Portfolio to £101,643.39, making an annual return of 24%!

Overall, nine teams from Truro School took part in the competition. A special mention goes to our team of 3^rd Year students (Henry, Jake, Louie and Sam) who finished second in the school, and in the top 1,000 teams nationally, increasing the value of their funds by over £5,000 (10% annual return).

The semi-final stage of the competition takes place over the four-week period from 20 February to 17 March 2017, and involves the teams predicting the closing price of certain assets by the end of trading on Friday each week. The eight best performing teams from the semi-finals progress to the national final, with the winning team receiving an all-expenses paid trip to New York.