Portrait (3) Team Komatsu, Seminar class of Associate Professor Yutaka Akiyama, Faculty of Economics

The seminar class of Associate Professor Yutaka Akiyama focuses on working in groups, which involves student discussions to achieve results. As part of such activities, students of the class participate in the “Yen Derby”, a contest to forecast the yen-dollar exchange rate. Contestants forecast the end-of-month exchange rate for the period of three months, based on economic and social situations. Four teams from Professor Akiyama’s seminar class entered last year’s contest, which was the 13th of its kind, and the team led by Maho Komatsu won the Outstanding Performance Award (Unique Award). This was the second straight win for the seminar class. “The team which forecasts the exchange rate closest to the actual figure becomes the overall winner, but we narrowed down our target to win the Outstanding Performance Award, which is awarded to the team with the most unique method to forecast the rate,” says Komatsu. Based on teammate Shota Hattori’s idea, the team created an index by calculating the number of articles of the Nikkei Newspaper that include words such as “strong yen” and “weak yen”, and figured out the correlation between the changes in the number of articles and the actual exchange rate, and used it for their forecast. This method was the reason for being awarded. The five members say that this activity taught them the importance of cooperative work. The experience will certainly serve as a great advantage in their future studies and careers.