Canisius College in western New York may have the best potential fund analysts in the world, according to a recent global competition sponsored by the CFA Institute.
The five-member team from Canisius participated in the CFA Institute Research Challenge Global Final and brought the title back to the United States for the first time since 2007.
The students put in hundreds of hours analyzing a public company of their choosing to recommend the action they felt a fund should take on an investment in the company -- buy, sell or hold. They then prepared a written report and defended their decision before a series of judges to come out on top of a bracket system, similar to a sports competition bracket.
The Research Challenge was launched in 2006 and has grown each year since then. More than 20,000 students have participated from colleges across the globe in the yearly event since then, says John Bowman, managing director and co-leader of education at the CFA Institute.
Business schools select outstanding students to compete in the CFA Institute local competitions and they work their way up through the brackets. This year Canisius College beat students from the Kyiv National Economic University in Ukraine, Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, and the University of Florida to win the title, which comes with a $10,000 award. This year 4,000 students from 865 universities and colleges started in the competition.
“This competition has been dominated by Asian and European winners for several years,” says Bowman, who is a former fund analyst. Many of the students will end up as CFA professionals. Winning the competition is a good resume booster, he says.
“I don’t want to boast, but winning the Research Challenge means we are the best student research analysts in the world,” says Matt Coad, one of the team members along with Ryan Zimmer, Stephen Miller, Kevin Monheim and Carl Larsson. Coad, who is in the one-year MBA program at Canisius, wants a career as a research analyst.
“The school is incredibly proud of us, but we could not have accomplished this without our professors,” he adds. “We gained real-world experience in what portfolio managers and analysts do.”
The students do their due diligence on the company they choose. The Canisius team chose Sovran Self Storage Inc. for their research. The students not only use public information and financial reports of the firms, but they visit the company and talked with owners and employees to determine how stable the company is and its potential for growth.
The work also taught them to judge each other and decide what roles each should play, which will be a helpful skill in the workplace, Zimmer says.