The Trading Pitt simulates Wall Street experience

One student group propelled a Pitt senior to a job on Wall Street.

This summer, Steve… One student group propelled a Pitt senior to a job on Wall Street.

This summer, Steve McMannis found a summer job at SMD Capital, a proprietary trading firm in New York, where, as an undergraduate, he developed a training program for currency trading.

He credits his success to learning the tricks of the trade outside the classroom.

“I came to Pitt knowing nothing, and two and half years later I worked on Wall Street because of The Trading Pitt,” McMannis, a senior economics major and president of the club, said.

The Trading Pitt is one of 10 clubs in the country that focuses on trading securities, including equities, foreign currencies and bonds. The club specializes in educating interested members in the fundamentals of finance.

Akash Goyal, a junior economics major on the pre-medicine track and the organization’s vice president, said trading securities is relevant to all fields.

“Markets affect everyone, as was apparent in 2008 when the entire country was hit in some way by the stock market crash,” he said.

The Trading Pitt, formed in 2008, had its first meeting of the semester on Sept. 21 in Sennott Square, in a packed room of more than 30 students.

McMannis said that students do not have to have trading experience to join the organization. The group meets twice a week — once for a how-to on stock market trading for the beginners, and a second time to discuss technical strategies and practice trading.

The organization meets in the finance labs in Mervis Hall, where the members use computers to run simulations as a group and trade for 20 to 30 minutes.

Club business manager Anthony Mele said The Trading Pitt is more like an intensive class than a student group.

“The club prepares you for Wall Street and the banking industry,” the Pitt senior said.

Those who have a passion for trading and investing use the skills they learn in the simulated setting of the group and apply it to investments they make outside of the culb.

“Some of these guys wake up at 3 in the morning to trade, because that is when the time is ripe,” Devorah Dlinn, a junior finance major, said. “My dad is a portfolio manager. I grew up with the market.”

Currency traders accommodate time differences between different stock markets and wake up at odd hours to make the best of economic relations worldwide.

Dlinn said that though the technicalities of trading can be intimidating for beginners, trading jargon becomes second nature to the invested member, and trading becomes a huge part of one’s life.

Conversations including company abbreviations and reports on the stock market’s ups and downs can be commonly overheard at the biweekly meetings.

“Trading is not that complicated,” Dlinn, a board member of the club, said. “All you’re doing is buying and selling shares of a company. You have to judge what is worth more or less. It’s like buying a coat at Burberry because it’s worth more than, say, a coat at Tommy Hilfiger.”

According to Dlinn, good traders are analytical and logical, trust their gut, have strong market knowledge and know when to cut losses. She said that often people get too attached to companies and lose out because of failures to pull out their investments when they should.

Dlinn went on to say that finance is a broad subject where strategies are up to the individual. People can get creative and really enjoy trading because there is no end to what people can do in the field.

The members of the organization do not trade as a team. Individual members create portfolios, compete and trade for themselves.

At meetings, the members talk about what is currently going on in the markets.

This year, the club plans to have speakers every other week. Club organizers have invited Mike Bellafiore, a co-founder of SMB Capital, and Timothy James, a custom engineering manager at Thomson Reuters. Co-founders of The Trading Pitt, Robert Spence and Cara Repasky, are also returning to Pitt to speak to the organization.

McMannis said learning how to trade in college gives organization members an advantage over other students who only learn the theories behind trading. He said that trading is all about the experience, so the earlier one starts, the more prepared one is.

Students interested in joining The Trading Pitt can email info.tradingpitt@gmail.com.