{"id":28239,"date":"2019-12-05T11:07:31","date_gmt":"2019-12-05T17:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=28239"},"modified":"2019-12-05T11:07:31","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T17:07:31","slug":"apsu-business-students-excel-at-investment-competitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2019\/12\/05\/apsu-business-students-excel-at-investment-competitions\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU business students excel at investment competitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – If you\u2019re looking for someone to manage your investments in the next few years, make sure they have a degree from Austin Peay State University (APSU). That\u2019s because a group of APSU business students recently earned several prominent accolades for their work overseeing close to a million dollars in investment funds.<\/p>\n

\"Austin<\/a>

Austin Peay State University Business Students Blake Streeter, Patrick Bush, Griffin Dove, Matthew O\u2019Brien, Riley Perkins and Bryan Warren. (APSU)<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The APSU College of Business allows students to manage two different investment funds \u2013 the $250,000 Larry Carroll Govs Fund and the $620,000 Tennessee Valley Authority Investment Fund.<\/p>\n

In April, APSU\u2019s TVA Investment Challenge Team earned second place at the 2019 Investment Challenge Annual Conference in Nashville, and last month, both the TVA team and the Larry Carroll Govs Fund Team earned second place at the Student Managed Investment Fund Consortium Conference in Chicago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is real money, and they\u2019re learning real skills they can take with them,\u201d Dr. Michael Phillips, APSU professor of finance, said. \u201cThey do a good job on a consistent basis, which means we have students that really care. And it\u2019s literally a student-managed fund. We oversee it and give them guidance, but they do the decisions and they do a fantastic job.\u201d<\/p>\n

The business students working on both teams include Blake Streeter, Patrick Bush, Griffin Dove, Matthew O\u2019Brien, Riley Perkins and Bryan Warren. Phillips and Dr. Don Nyonna, professor of finance, serve as the faculty advisors.<\/p>\n

The Larry Carroll Govs Fund<\/h3>\n

Last year, APSU alumnus and University Trustee Larry Carroll donated $250,000 to the APSU College of Business to give students the opportunity to invest with real money. Carroll, who is consistently named among Forbes\u2019 Top Wealth Advisors in the Country, provided the money in October 2018, leaving the APSU students in charge of the quarter of a million dollar fund.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a nutshell, they told us, \u2018Here is $250,000 \u2013 figure out what to do with it,\u2019\u201d Matthew O\u2019Brien, president of the student team, said. \u201cWe were trying to figure out how to invest the money so we didn\u2019t even touch the fund until January. Before we touched the money, it lost $20,000 because the market dropped.\u201d<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t a hypothetical $20,000. That money was part of Carroll\u2019s gift to the college, and the loss prompted the team to form an investment strategy that would earn that money back. The students identified 11 business sectors for each team member to analyze and decide which companies they should include in their portfolio.<\/p>\n

[320left]\u201cWe got together and decided, \u2018we don\u2019t want to be in this sector or we really like technology or we really like health care,\u2019\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cThat kind of drove our allocation process. It was definitely a democratic process to decide where to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the Chicago competition, the students demonstrated how from October 2018 to October 2019 the Govs Fund earned a 4.5 percent return, outperforming the Standard and Poor\u2019s Index of 2.3 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we made our moves, it was a good time; we were lucky because the market recovered,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cBut we did a really good job picking our funds because that\u2019s what we presented in Chicago. We almost doubled the S&P Index. Not bad for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The TVA Investment Challenge Team<\/h3>\n
\"Second<\/a>

Second place at 2019 Investment Challenge Annual Conference. (APSU)<\/p><\/div>\n

Since 1998, the TVA has hosted its Investment Challenge, which has student investment teams from 25 universities competing to manage and earn the highest return for TVA funds. During the competition, students develop long-term investment strategies, place trades and provide performance reports to TVA. At Austin Peay, the investment team is made up of students enrolled in Phillips\u2019 Selecting Equity Investments course.<\/p>\n

Even though it\u2019s a class, the students make the final decision on how the TVA funds should be invested.<\/p>\n

[320right]\u201cWe start with how to develop an investment philosophy, and then we ask, \u2018what is a good company and why should you invest in it?\u2019\u201d Riley Perkins, vice president of the student team, said. \u201cThere are about 30 stocks we\u2019re currently invested in, and we distribute the responsibility to follow these stocks throughout the semester.\u201d<\/p>\n

The students also look for new stocks that might help the portfolio\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to make a decision whether we buy or sell,\u201d she said. \u201cThen at the end of the semester we present our performance at the TVA conference.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fund outperformed the benchmark with 481 basis points, earning the team a second-place finish at the competition.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt TVA, they were super impressed,\u201d Phillips said. \u201cThey competed against 25 universities, and they knocked it out of the park.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – If you\u2019re looking for someone to manage your investments in the next few years, make sure they have a degree from Austin Peay State University (APSU). That\u2019s because a group of APSU business students recently earned several prominent accolades for their work overseeing close to a million dollars in investment funds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,4640,262,34380,34385,512,825,34382,27044,34379,34383,25902,4950,34381,34384,819,588],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-7lt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28240,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28239\/revisions\/28240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}