UNB students finish second at investment research competition
Four University of New Brunswick students will return home winners after finishing second overall in the world championship of an investment research competition in New York City on Thursday.
After winning a competition against schools in the Atlantic provinces in the fall, and placing first in the North American competition Wednesday, the four students from UNB Fredericton finished second in the world to a team from the University of Hong Kong in the finals.
Teams from universities around the world had 10 minutes each to pitch their stock recommendations in the second annual Global Investment Research Challenge.
Team members Jason Misener, Dustin Besaw, Jack Ma and Brian Bagnell chose TD Bank (TSX:TD), while the winning team from Hong Kong selected telecommunications giant China Mobile (NYSE: CHL).
Bagnell, a 30-year-old Fredericton native, said they chose TD Bank because of its recent string of aggressive acquisitions as well as its undervalued stock.
The company took advantage of the strong Canadian dollar to acquire several financial institutions in the U.S., which positions the bank favourably against its competitors, Bagnell said.
"The bank industry is not doing well, but looking into the future, especially the Canadian bank industry stocks are really cheap, and have probably hit bottom," said Ma, a 23-year-old student from China who has been studying at UNB Fredericton this year.
"By investing in the bank industry now, we buy at a good price and will likely make gains in the future."
Bagnell said they prepared a 10-minute presentation for the competition, including evaluation of the bank industry and the company itself.
"This is the kind of thing an equity analyst would do in their normal day's work," said Bagnell, a business administration in his final year.
As Bagnell and his teammates prepare to enter the workforce, he said their success at this event will be a big boost for their resumes.
The group grew close through the university's student investment fund, a program that allows students to manage real money in capital markets.
The students run a small portion of the $9 billion New Brunswick investment management corporation, which manages the pension plans for roughly 45,000 members of the public service, teachers, and judges.
In 10 years the fund has grown from $1 million to $2.2 million, which works out to a rate of return of roughly 9.2 per cent.
"On the equity side over a ten year period, we outperformed the TSX bench mark by 43 basis points, which is very impressive," said Glenn Cleland, the founding director of the investment fund and a UNB finance professor, who accompanied the group to New York.
"We've done very close to a lot of major money managers. As Glenn likes to joke we have the same performance but we're a lot cheaper," Bagnell said.
On Friday the group visited the NASDAQ stock exchange, where the winning team from Hong Kong got to ring the bell to close the markets for the day.
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