The main award of the President of the Stock Exchange | Gdańsk University of Technology

The aim of the competition is to encourage students to broaden their knowledge of the capital market, the institutions that create its infrastructure, as well as modern financial instruments. 69 works from 34 universities from all over Poland were submitted for this year's edition. The submitted works were assessed by the competition jury consisting of academics and employees of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The substantive level of the work was taken into account, and in particular: the originality, the method of analyzing various phenomena, the scope of the research, and the innovativeness of the formulated conclusions.

The subject of the awarded diploma thesis was "Construction of an investment portfolio with minimal risk - the optimal length of the estimation window on the example of the Warsaw Stock Exchange and Borsa Italiana". The thesis was written under the supervision of PhD Marcin Potrykus.

– When investing in the stock market, we usually want to earn as much as possible while bearing the lowest possible risk. The subject was dealt with by Nobel Prize winner Harry Markowitz, who created a model to help achieve this goal. In my work, I examined whether the model can actually be useful if we only have historical data on stock prices, and how many past observations are needed for it to be most effective. It turns out that in recent years, on average, using data from the last 465-500 trading days on the WSE, the model did help to reduce the risk. Interestingly, in the case of the Italian stock exchange, the number of necessary observations was lower by more than half – says Piotr Sulewski.

For his bachelor thesis Piotr Sulewski won the first award ex aequo with Karolina Krygier from the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań.