RSM students will participate in CFA Research Challenge in Chicago

The CFA Inistitute Research Challenge is an annual competition for finance students. Anton Chausovskyy, Daria Belenkova, Fabio Proietto, Michael Enninghorst, and Sheldon Arcand Laliberte, students of the Master Finance & Investements, are representing the Erasmus University Rotterdam this year.

In order to make it to the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) final the team had to compete with other teams from universities in the Benelux region. They all made an equity report for Biocartis, a relatively new company in the personalized medicine world. Each team held a ten minute presentation after which the jurors were able to ask questions for another ten minutes. “We made an equity report for the company”, team member Anton Chausovskyy says. “The process started in August, even though we were not really working on the analysis by then. In total we spent hundreds of hours working on it.”

Chicago

In April the five team members, will be heading towards Chicago with one mentor. Chausovskyy: “We were very lucky, this edition they decided to fly all the teams to Chicago for the regionals, usually this would’ve taken place somewhere in the EMEA region.”

While they had to compete with teams that made a report for the same company in the Benelux final, they will be facing opponents that have analyzed other companies in the EMEA finals. “We will only change the presentation for the finals in Chicago, the report will stay the same. But because the jurors have less knowledge of the company beforehand we pay less attention to the details in the presentation”, says Chausovskyy.

Finals

The dream, of course is to win the competition, in order to do so they first have to defeat the other EMEA teams and after that win the global round. Chausovskyy: “The global round will be a different level, but of course winning it would be great.”