Wednesday, July 26, 2017
The 2017 Investment Research Challenge (IRC) was held on Friday, July 14.
This was the fifth year of the competition. Twenty-two teams (comprised of 85 students) participated in the first round - the majority of participants were 2B students. A total of 12 teams (48 students) participated last year.
The stocks pitched in the competition were mid-cap stocks that had sparse publicly available research. The stocks were from the consumer discretionary sector with a history of positive cash flows that was feasible for all participants.
Competition Winners
The Anish Chopra IRC Prize winners were:
First Place - Prize ($2,000)
Katherine Chan (AFM 4A), Kevin Ding (CFM 2B), Billy Lam (AFM 4A) - Pool Corp
Second Place - Prize ($1,000)
Ho Choi, Dominic Lau, Jeffrey Liu, Kevan Lo - Wolverine
Third Place - Prize ($700)
Mugdha Gupta (AFM 2B), Lu Jin (AFM 4A), Monica Naguib (Biotech-CPA 4A), Jaskirat Sahi (AFM 2B) - Thor
Fourth Place - Prize ($300)
Kevin Osei-Ababio (AFM 4A), Zao Chen (Biotech-CPA 3B), Jasper lam (AFM 3B), Michelle Li (AFM 3B) - Cooper Tires and Rubber
Fifth Place - Prize ($200)
Jason Fu (Math-CPA -2B), Peter Huang (CFM 2B), Jonathan Hui (AFM 2B), David Ou (MAcc) - Polaris
Anish Chopra addressed the student winners before giving away their monetary prizes. In his address, he noted his enthusiasm for the improvements that these students have shown each year.
Three of the judges from the industry panel were alumni from the student investment fund and previous CFA/IRC winners.
A special thank you
We thank Changling, Donna, D’Arcy, Frank, Garvin, and Shari, and students, Ryan Korn, Jiacheng Fan and Daniel Zhang for participating in the judging panel in the first round. The judges in the first round provided feedback to each presenting team shortly after the team's Q&A session was done.
We thank the judges in the final round:
We thank the judges in the final round:
- Karan Balachandar, Investment Banking Analyst, TD Securities
- Richard Ma, Investment Banking Analyst, CIBC Capital Markets
- Prasanth Pahirathan, Manager Finance, TD Securities
- Andy Wang, Associate, Principal Credit Investments, CPP Investment Board
- Steve Balaban, Chief Investment Officer, Mink Capital and Lecturer, School of Accounting and Finance, University of Waterloo
We are grateful to Anish Chopra and the CPA-SAF Centre for Capital Markets Education for their generous support of the event.