SOM Students Win CNBC Fast Money Challenge and Energy Finance Challenge

Bob Doherty, Koichi Kurisu, Jeff Levi, and Krishnan Vishwanathan, from the Class of 2008, defeated students from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in the championship round of the CNBC Fast Money MBA Challenge, which aired live from the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square on August 22.

The new game show, billed as “the varsity sport of the financial mind,” pitted 32 MBA students from eight top business schools against each other in a single-elimination tournament. The game play of each episode included answering financial trivia questions in the categories of “Capital Gains,” “Build the Bank,” “Name That Ticker,” “Hostile Takeover,” and “The $100,000 Question.” Read the full story.

And just last month, a team of five members of the Class of 2008 won the National Energy Finance Challenge, defeating 15 other schools to claim the title, and the $8,000 prize money, at the University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business in Austin.

The event was a marathon case study, followed by a grilling by the competition’s judges, who weren’t told which school each team represented. The SOM group — known as the Black Admirals, a nod to an early clandestine British survey of Saudi Arabian oil — received the case, authored by an employee at Chevron, on Tuesday September 11 at 6 p.m. and was required to have their answers ready by the same time two days later — in Austin. Read the full story.