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Cal Poly Pomona Students Win Investment Competition

A team of Cal Poly Pomona business students has won the 2019 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Society Student Managed Investment Fund Competition, organized by the Orange County chapter. The 19-member team is now managing a $75,000 investment portfolio for the organization.

The competition was initiated at the start of the academic year with the organization’s request for proposals (RFPs) for investment management services.

Students teams from LA and Orange Counties then submitted written proposals about their investment philosophy and process, economic outlook, market overview, asset allocation, fixed income & equity valuation and selection, portfolio construction, monitoring and risk management processes, and more. Each team also made a 30-minutes presentation and defended their proposal. 

The Bronco team proposed a portfolio of 33 securities, covering all sectors of the equities market and fixed income market. Each security was supported by in-depth research and analyst report with supporting logic and valuations.

The students began managing the new portfolio by executing their portfolio security purchases during December. Their performance will be measured for the period Jan. 1 2020 to Dec. 31, 2020.

The team members, who are also part of the Cal Poly Pomona Student Managed Investment Club (SMIC), are: Jonathan Oliver, Zachary Winkle, Joseph Baierl, Omar Pelcastre, Kevin A. Cifuentes, Bryan Arciniega Medrano , Sindy Fabrizio, Cristian Saldana, Tushar Nandwani, Patricia Balogun, Kareem Tobgy, Kevin Carrillo, Jessica Sands, Johans Acosta, Jacob Zaldivar, Jeremy Jenanyan, Francis Zhao , Xuan Tran and Whittni Wibisono.

Professor Pawan Tomkoria is the Student-Managed Investment Fund class instructor and program co-advisor with Professor Alex Wei Wu.

With the win, Cal Poly Pomona set the competition record for the amount of time from beginning participation to first place – three years. The Broncos finished third (2017) and fourth (2018). This year, CSU Long Beach took second place, CSU Fullerton was in third and UC Irvine in fourth. All three will manage smaller portfolios for the organization.

Cal Poly Pomona’s SMIF program, offered through the Finance, Real Estate and Law Department, gives students experiential learning experience in security analysis and portfolio management. Founded in fall 2017, the program began with an approximately $200,000 investment under a Cal Poly Pomona alumnus’ personal portfolio. Its mission is aided by the use of big financial data and analytics platforms provided through twelve interactive Bloomberg terminals in our “Dr. J. Douglas Ramsey Financial Markets Room.” 

“Our main goal,” says Tomkoria, “is to teach about the real world of investments and how to build a diversified long-term portfolio that optimizes the balance between risk and reward. Our hope is that this gives our students a competitive advantage in their career search after graduation. Very few college students will have the real-world experience that this program provides. As several students have landed prestigious internships and/or jobs, we feel we are making good progress for our young program.”

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