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Home / Newsroom / John Carroll University finance major earns 2nd place in nationwide investing competition: wins $3K
Thomas Gliebe, a Finance major at John Carroll University, decided to invest his free time in a challenge that would help hone his professional skills. He chose the Market Madness contest, launched in Spring 2017 by Investopedia. Investopedia promotes itself as the website with the largest financial education content in the world. Thomas ended up earning second place from among 3,300 students who participated in the national competition! Investopedia provided the students with $50,000 in virtual cash. In the end, Thomas won $3,000 in real cash. “The objective was to make the most money by trading stocks,” Thomas explained. He added, “My strategy was to buy options on stocks that were about to report earnings. My best trades were Micron call options and Wells Fargo put options.” Thomas finished the investment competition with increased earnings of $278,647.27, which placed him in the #2 spot. Thomas has used Investopedia as a learning source to help him find opinions on financial articles. For the rising senior, the focus was not to win a grand prize, but instead to see how well he could do against students from different states and universities across the nation. The nationwide event began in late January and ended in April. Thomas noted, “doing a competition during the semester was harder than I imagined.” Constestants had to manage their school schedules with personal time in order to make it through the hectic three months. The stock market is open 9:30 a.m. until 4 p.m., Monday through Friday – peak times for classes. “I spent a lot of time on my phone and on my laptop,” he explained Although Thomas had to independently navigate this competition, his classroom experience at John Carroll provided the foundation for his success: “I can’t thank John Carroll enough, because of its outstanding Boler School of Business, and for teaching me about investment strategies." This article was written by Alondra Garcia, JCU Class of 2018.