Another winning student team from the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) will represent Ontario at the Americas Regional competition of the international CFA Institute Research Challenge. Congratulations to Brent Small (AFM), Adnan Khan (AFM), Daniel Zhang (Biotech/CA), Kamaljot Dhaliwal (CFM) and Rudder Zhang (BMath).
The CFA Institute Research Challenge requires student teams (1 team per university) to evaluate a selected public company, with Canadian Tire being this year’s company. Canadian Tire is a public corporation that also owns companies such as the Forzani Group, which includes Sport Chek and other sporting goods stores, Mark’s (a clothing retailer), CT REIT (a real estate income trust) and Canadian Tire’s gas station business, making it a challenging company to analyze.
- CFA Society Toronto media release
Students put an enormous amount of time - some over 200 hours of research – into their written report and preparation to present their buy/sell/hold recommendations for the publicly traded company. The SAF student team logged dozens of hours spent on Skype running through their presentation scripts as 3 team members were located at Waterloo on an academic term, and 2 were located in Toronto and Ottawa for their co-op work terms.
SAF Finance lecturer and the team’s faculty mentor, Craig Geoffrey, prepared the students well to ensure that their depth of knowledge of the case and their insightful valuation was noticed by the industry judges. It was best demonstrated during the final Q&A session to which, “each question answered [by the student team was] with pinpoint accuracy.” [...]