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On November 29, the team from Chicago Booth won CNBC's MBA Face-off Challenge, a simulated portfolio competition pitting eight top MBA programs against each other to see who can produce the largest returns. Each team is comprised of 10 students who are given a fictional allowance of $1 million. Using mostly index and inverse exchange traded funds, the team produced an average return of more than 23%, despite the overall S&P index finishing down -8.3% over the same period.
The Booth team finished with an average portfolio of over $1,237,00, outperforming their nearest rival – Cornell’s Johnson School - by over $118,000, or nearly 10% margin. Throughout the contest, Booth was 100% vested in mostly index and inverse ETFs, and their currencies portfolios focused on EUR/US pair. Aided by ultra-volatile and inverse ETFs, the underlying strategy seemed to focus on directional market movement, which allowed traders to participate in broader market rallies and sell-offs equally.
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MBA Face-off Challenge Leaderboard Rankings
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| Rank | University/Program | Average Portfolio Value | ||
| 1 | University of Chicago (Booth School of Business) | $1,237,198.17 | ||
| 2 | Cornell University (Johnson Graduate School of Management) | $1,118,702.98 | ||
| 3 | University of Michigan (Ross School of Business) | $1,100,266.42 | ||
| 4 | Georgetown University (McDonough School of Business) | $1,050,377.10 | ||
| 5 | Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper School of Business) | $1,042,767.76 | ||
| 6 | The Ohio State University (Fisher College of Business) | $1,025,627.69 | ||
| 7 | University of Notre Dame (Mendoza College of Business) | $999,876.61 | ||
| 8 | University of Texas-Austin (McCombs School of Business) | $978,016.63 | ||
Listed below are the individual Chicago Booth team members and their portfolio scores. Impressively, all members of the team had positive returns at a time when the overall market was down.
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Rank
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Name | Currencies | Equities | Total Portfolio Value |
| 1 | Christopher Myers | $96,369.04 | $1,196,955.91 | $1,293,324.95 |
| 2 | Scott Shiao | $99,297.54 | $1,174,943.06 | $1,274,240.60 |
| 3 | Alexander Stein | $98,566.31 | $1,165,544.87 | $1,264,111.18 |
| 4 | Nikhil Shenoy | $99,447.67 | $1,156,354.32 | $1,255,801.99 |
| 5 | Manas Babbli | $99,195.54 | $1,154,810.88 | $1,254,006.42 |
| 6 | David Feldstein | $99,428.12 | $1,150,479.43 | $1,249,907.55 |
| 7 | Michael Kuszynski | $99,223.54 | $1,129,086.62 | $1,228,310.16 |
| 8 | Michael McCann | $100,000.00 | $1,124,722.19 | $1,224,722.19 |
| 9 | Vasily Gorev | $81,268.48 | $1,114,383.84 | $1,195,652.32 |
| 10 | Ramanathan Sundaram | $102,160.49 | $1,029,743.85 | $1,131,904.34 |
Watch the announcement on CNBC
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