Students win prize for crypto strategy

A team of three students from the Master’s degree program in Finance at the University of Liechtenstein have won a competition held over several weeks, details of which can be found in a press release issued by the university. The competition was held as part of the elective module ‘Machine Learning in Finance’ taught by Dr. Sebastian Stöckl. The task at hand involved predicting the yields on 50 cryptocurrencies using machine learning techniques before making the best investment decisions for 2020/21 on the basis of this data. Bank Frick, which cooperates with the Institute for Finance, awarded a check for one thousand Swiss francs to the winning team.

The students were successful in their attempts to train algorithms using data from the period 2017 to 2019. On this basis, they created a predictive model. “We combined two machine learning models for short and long-term forecasts in order to define an investment strategy that linked short-term timing with long-term market perspectives”, explains one of the three winners Markus Wabnig. To achieve this, the group had to dedicate an immense amount of time, “but in so doing were happy to learn so much”, according to his fellow students.

According to Dr. Stöckl, the core elective modules offered as part of the Master’s Degree Program in Finance since 2021 at the University of Liechtenstein, “have incredible potential to bring together special topics such as sustainability, the token economy or even machine learning in finance and innovative teaching methods with a group of highly motivated students in order to achieve optimal learning success”.