NATIONAL CHAMPIONS
COMPETE ON WORLD
STAGE AT RESEARCH
CHALLENGE
GLOBAL FINAL
After winning the national final in Boston,
three graduating Davis College of Business
students boarded their 28-hour flight to Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia for their final competition
at the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst)
Research Challenge Global Final against the
top five universities in the world. The annual
challenge is a global competition that provides
university students with hands-on mentoring
and intensive training in financial analysis.
This year the CFA winnowed through
over 5,500 students from more than 1,100
universities across 87 countries worldwide
before coming to a final five teams that
competed on April 27. The JU team included
students Jamie Seim, an Executive Master
of Business Administration (EMBA)
candidate; Henry Crayton, a Master of
Business Administration (MBA) candidate;
and Maria Juliana Fueyo, an undergraduate
senior double-majoring in finance and
economics.
It all began with an upper-level financial
course based on the Dolphin Student
Investment Fund (DSIF) that was established
in 2009, by an endowment from the Davis
family. Advised by Assistant Professor
Daphne Wang and Professor Abdel Missa of
the JU Davis College of Business, students
are given hands-on experience making buy,
sell and hold decisions in the fund’s portfolio,
which is comprised primarily of U.S. equities
and exchange traded funds. Outstanding
students from the DSIF course are chosen to
join the CFA Team.
“What we are trying to do with the DSIF and
CFA research challenge is to bridge the gap
From left to right: Henry Crayton, a Master of Business
Administration (MBA) candidate; Maria Juliana Fueyo
an undergraduate senior double-majoring in finance and
economics; and Jamie Seim, an Executive Master of
Business Administration (EMBA) candidate.
between theory and practice,” Dr. Missa
says. “We want our students to be productive
in the workforce from day one.”
The secret sauce to this method is the
insistence that every recipe can use
refinement. Chair of Accounting, Finance and
Economics Dr. Robert Boylan explains that
Dr. Missa’s background as a Deutsche Bank
executive managing billions in client assets
provides students with reality-based training:
“He treats these students as if they were
analysts. He forces them to make executive
decisions using a kind of Socratic method. He
asks them questions and gets them to take
their analysis further.”
Dr. Missa attributes the students’ success to
taking that deep dive into the company they
had been assigned for the competition.
“The team covered the Harris Corporation
from all angles,” he says, explaining their
exemplary financial understanding and
quantitative skills in analyzing whether to
buy, sell or hold stock of the Florida-based
defense contractor. They conducted detailed
research of Harris’ corporate competitors,
suppliers and customers.
Knowing information and presenting it,
however, are different skills. “You need to
be able to integrate opinions quickly on the
fly,” Dr. Boylan says. “Dr. Missa had a very
good strategy for preparing the team with
the first 10-minute talk and then for how to
answer questions in terms of parsing out the
information based on who was good at what
and who knew more about certain areas.
Then, he made sure that more than one
person answered every question.”
The three competitors were prepped well
for the repetitive heats they had to endure
to reach the CFA finals. Seim describes it as
a financial March Madness with bracketed
rounds of competition. In the end, JU
had passed 16 teams in the Florida state
competition then another 55 in the Americas
Continued on next page.
WAVEMAGAZINEONLINE.COM
13