Congratulations to the ICMA Centre's latest graduates

Financial experts from the University of Reading's ICMA Centre are to investigate medieval foreign exchange. The University has recently won a Research Project Grant worth almost £200,000 from the Leverhulme Trust.[1] The research team, comprising Professors Adrian Bell and Chris Brooks, and Dr Tony Moore, will examine in detail the workings of the markets for foreign currency trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

MSc and BSc students at the ICMA Centre that take the portfolio management course are involved in an assessed group project where they have to build and evaluate a hypothetical portfolio with securities of their choice using real time data. The new web-based ICMA Centre portfolio simulation platform that has been developed by StockTrak Inc and customised by Dr George Alexandridis allows students to trade securities in most major markets around the world in real time and build and manage large portfolios.

ICMA Centre student, Afua Addae (pictured here with fellow student Aleksander Petreski), who studied the MSc in Financial Risk Management, has received the commendation of runner-up for the Eurekahedge prize for the best paper on hedge funds after working on a major project based on Eurekahedge data for her MSc. After completing a BSc degree in Chemical Engineering in Ghana, Afua moved to the UK and decided to study at the ICMA Centre after working for a year and a half with Nationwide Building Society, UK. She will graduate in July 2007 with a merit. During her MSc study she worked part time as a research consultant with Lepus Management Consultancy, a risk management consultancy in London where her researches on ?Basel II Implementation: Lessons Learnt from the First Round of IRB Applications', ?The Risk and Regulatory Environment in Commodity Trading' and ?Rogue Trading', have been published on Lepus' Risk Monthly Reports.