A Financial Services Gaming Simulation

The goal of this project was to design a card game simulation of financial trade markets. In a trading environment, a market maker quotes two prices for a specific type of financial instrument, such as a stock option. Traders then buy shares from or sell shares to the market maker. The decision of the market maker to quote prices at certain levels, and the traders' decisions to buy or sell are based primarily on their independent estimation of the fair market value, or the true price of the instrument, once all information has been accounted for. The goal of the market maker is to quote prices which best reflect the fair market value of the financial instrument. The simulation developed for this project was designed to accurately account for these behaviors. This project sought to fulfil the need of the Susquehanna International Group of Companies (SIG) for a recruitment tool that can be distributed in large numbers at employment venues such as career fairs. The recruitment tool is essentially an informational CD-ROM that includes a home page, a game page with the simulation, and a quiz page with probability questions. This tool helps users assess their interest, and ability to perform in a financial market making environment. A University of Virginia (UVA) Systems and Information Engineering Capstone team worked with SIG to define a format and set of rules by which the simulation game would be played. A card game style format was adopted in which cards from a standard fiftytwo card deck represent information that would bear impact on a financial instrument's final price, such as earnings reports and news stories. The human player acts as the market maker and the computer players act as traders. Each player is dealt separate cards to simulate the diversity of information available in financial trade markets. There are three computer players and one human player. The capstone team developed the mathematical logic to be used by computer players in the game, and has created a working prototype of the game to test this logic. A graphical user interface (GUI) has also been developed to make the tool user friendly and aesthetically pleasing. This GUI was tested to validate its usability and aesthetics and was incorporated into the prototype simulation