AEP Teams Take the Wall Street ChallengeActively managing an investment portfolio means work. It is more than selecting your mutual funds in your retirement account and then never looking at them again. It is more than watching Mad Money every night. And, it's more than just picking the stock of your favorite company and hoping that it does well.
Four Austin Entrepreneurship Program teams in Weatherford Hall learned that and more as they spent three weeks getting into the nitty gritty of making (and losing) money via the stock market. The "Wall Street Challenge" was coordinated by Finance Club Secretary and Weatherford Resident Assistant Iryna Papalamava with the aim of giving Weatherford residents appreciation of what can happen to entrepreneurial ventures that harvest through listing on public markets. Using the Yahoo Finance simulation, teams were allowed to invest $1 million and tracked their investments for two weeks. Prizes were awarded for Best Overall Performance and Best Research. Each team was required to present their results and explain their strategy to their peers in a formal presentation.
"Participants in the Wall Street Challenge were only allowed to place their investments in companies that were listed since 1990," said Papalamava.
Winners of the Best Research award, Derek Gomez and Nate Edwards, researched 25 different companies and spent more than 25 hours sitting in on company shareholder quarterly results conference calls and analyzing financial data. Getting up early in the morning for East Coast-based calls was a little bit out of their college routine.
The winners of the competition, though, based their chances all on one stock. Chad Schlottmann and Cody Coons researched and selected RF Micro Devices and took first place overall for having the highest percent of growth and largest total return. For their victory, they received a large television for the lounge on their floor in Weatherford Hall. Gomez and Edwards won a stereo for their floor.
Two other teams participated in the competition. The team of Tyler Gerding, Stephanie Keibel, Courtney Pedersen and Ryan Hoefer invested in Movie Galor. The team of Scott Molloy and Michael Beall invested in Live Person, Pegasus Wireless and Cognizant Technology Solutions.
"This experiential learning activity taught residents about how risky and volatile young companies are at the high-growth stage of the business-cycle and gave them an understanding of the ways to evaluate their performance," said Faculty-In-Residence, Justin Craig.
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