Contacts
A prestigious first place for Laurin Komar, with a record score, and an honorable mention for Alessandro Pacifici in the competition reserved for students of the universities of the GNAM network

With a year of stock market activity compressed into 1 single online game the competition in this 2026 edition of the Yale Stock Trading Game was intense and heated. But the outcome was of great satisfaction for Bocconi students with Laurin Komar, with the largest margin of victory in the game’s history, obtaining first place and Alessandro Pacifici receiving an honorable mention after posting the second-highest return in the final. Laurin and Alessandro are classmates in the Finance Global Experience track of the MSc in Finance.

This edition of the game was reserved to students of the universities of the Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM) and saw 265 students from 18 schools around the world compete.

The game was initially devised in the 1970’s by Roger Ibbotson, Emeritus Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management, to teach students the fundamental concepts behind the stock market. And in 2019, the Yale School of Management Case Study Team helped Professor Ibbotson shepherd the game into a fully web-based experience.

A player’s objective in the Stock Trading Game is to amass the portfolio of stocks and cash with the greatest liquidation value. The game simulates a year of market activity in a single game. All players start with the same portfolio of five shares in each of four “companies” - they then buy and sell stocks based on public and private information about each company revealed to them over the course of the game. 

Laurin, whose strategy of buying private information, trading bid-ask spreads, and aggressively short-selling earned a 31% return for the largest margin of victory in the game’s history.

“I have always been interested in trading and financial markets and this was a great opportunity to challenge myself with my peers,” says Laurin. “The notions I picked up in the courses I had in the first semester in Empirical and Quantitative Finance and in Derivates proved extremely useful for the game. It was an intriguing experience to build a Bayesian estimator model and put it to the test to maximise the use of information and predict market outcomes. The whole game highlighted the importance in trading of being well prepared and maximizing the value you can get from information.”

 

 

 

 

Teaching