

Stepinac High School Team is Off to Impressive Start in Highly Competitive 2023 Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge
Stepinac is again the only team from Westchester competing. Like last year’s team which finished in top tier, Stepinac’s financially savvy investors are again competing in field dominated by Universities, Colleges and top-ranked business graduate programs from throughout the World.
Last year, Stepinac High School’s team of five savvy investors, members of the school’s Susan and Daniel P. Mahoney Economics and Finance Honors Academy, finished in the top tier of the highly competitive 2022 Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge.
This year’s Stepinac team
is already off to an impressive start. In fact, in their first week of the 2023
Bloomberg Challenge just completed, Stepinac’s team ranked 119 out of 1,647
teams with open positions and 2,004 teams registered for the
competition. “Our starting ranking is 85% better this year versus last
year,” said Rackeal Bellamy, moderator of Stepinac’s Economics and
Finance Honors Academy and chair of the Business Academic Department.
Last year’s Stepinac team, after five weeks of stiff competition, ranked 99 out of 946 teams from around the world and, in the North America rankings, placed 31 among the 327 teams. “These were truly remarkable achievements as Stepinac’s team from the outset of the Challenge outperformed many universities, colleges as well as top-ranked business graduate programs that dominated the field,” explained Bellamy. Among those Stepinac surpassed were NYU Shanghai, NYU Abu Dhabi and Baruch College CUNY. Last year’s first place winner was the University of Southampton, Great Britain.
Stepinac was also among a handful of high schools that competed in the Bloomberg Challenge and the only one from Westchester that finished in the top tiers of the international and North America rankings. This year, Stepinac is one of just five high schools, and again the only one from Westchester, that is competing.
Stepinac’s team, named The Capital Crusaders, comprises five academically top performing students including Marc Rainone of White Plains (team captain); Ryan Saunders of Thornwood; John Williamson of Ossining; Owen Dowicz of White Plains and Ryan Strzalkowski of Rye Neck. Three of them--Rainone, Dowicz and Strzalkowski—were on on last year’s team.
As in last year’s Challenge, this year’s teams were each given $1 million in virtual U.S. dollars to invest in stocks. The objective of the Challenge is to outperform the Bloomberg WLS Index (Index (World, Large, Mid and Small Cap Price Return).
In this year’s investment strategy, Stepinac’s investors “have leaned on key financial performance metrics, along with geopolitical and economic news to determine which companies to open their initial positions in and strategically weigh the sectors within their portfolios to reach the goal of outperforming Bloomberg’s WLS,” explained Bellamy, adding: ”They will continue to monitor current events both domestically and globally to reposition their portfolio for success.“
In advance of entering the 2023 Challenge, the Stepinac team prepared by virtually attending CNBC's "Delivering Alpha" Summit ”which provided them with insight from industry leaders on the state of the economy and how to find opportunities to create a strong investment portfolio,” Bellamy noted.
Stepinac’s decision to start competing in the annual Bloomberg Global Trading Challenge followed the school’s launch two years ago of the 1,500-squre-floot Finance Center, an advanced, college-level, real-world learning technology equipped with Bloomberg Terminals. The Bloomberg Terminals help students to conduct technical analysis of the companies they select.
A distinctive Wall Street atmosphere features LED ticker displays in real time, an essential tool used daily by newsrooms, financial wealth management firms, and university business school finance labs. In addition, the new lab allows for the integration of the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg Market Concepts into the curriculum.
“The unique Finance Center equipped with Bloomberg Terminals, devoted to teaching professional literacy in finance at a college level, represents another Stepinac first in curriculum innovation,” said Frank Portanova (Class of ’93), Vice Principal of Curriculum and Academic Studies. “Applying their studies to the real world is what will create the innovators of the future.”