University of Washington Tacoma student Evan Garner recently competed in the 2026 Investment Challenge, where he debuted a successful AI investment model competitive to Wall Street investors.
Garner is a nontraditional student who has faced adversity leading up to his enrollment at UWT, a release said. A finance student at the Milgard School of Business, Garner’s participation in the challenge required him to take a fictional client’s investment portfolio and increase its value. Garner’s AI investment model was able to outperform other competing teams, increasing value by more than 50% of the second-place team.
Garner’s model uses tools like Google Antigravity and Claude code to build a self-improving, ensemble machine-learning system that analyzes the equity market and treats it as a card game, the release said. The model then uses probability theory to rank and sort stocks and uses said “cards” to determine which equities to buy, sell, or hold. Over time, the model would hold on to cards that can maintain or gain value…