CMCnotes

Passing along a prvate equity investment associate opportunity with the Stephens Group for Summer 2020. The Stephens Group (“SG”) is a private equity firm based in Little Rock, AR targeting investments in industries across the U.S., including industrial and commercial products and services, specialty distribution, B2B food and beverage, consumer products, and technology infrastructure and tech-enabled services. SG is backed by the resources of the Stephens Family. SG targets deploying $150 - $200 million of equity capital each year, which equates to a fund of $800 million to $1 billion.

Enterprising Investor, a CFA Institute publication had a nice summary of James Valetine’s CFA Institute 2017 Conference presentation: Equity Research and Valuation. Valentine is a former transportation analyst with Morgan Stanley who now runs AnalystSolutions, an equity analyst evaluation and training firm. He is also the author of Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts, an excellent how-to book for aspiring analysts. We assign numerous readings from the book in the Applied Equity Markets Research (AEMR) class and highly recommend it. The author describes Valentine’s 11 rules of thumb when determining equity valuations and setting price targets.

In an earlier post (Investment Philosophy Matters When Generating Ideas) we highlighted that growth and value investors typically look at different things when identifying new ideas. Growth investors tend to focus on growth in sales and earnings, while value investors focus on price relative to something that proxies for the value of the company like assets, earnings, or cash flows. Professional investors generate ideas in many ways, but one common approach is to use screens that filter a large universe of stocks for the ones with characteristics the investors think likely to yield attractive investments - consistent with their philosophy. Factset has a powerful screening tool you can use to identify your own ideas.

CMC alumnus Jessica Chen wants you to know Goldman Sachs 2020 summer analyst application is now open. The attached documents describe the opportunities and outline the recruiting process with links to Goldman's career site. Goldman reviews applications on a rolling basis - so apply as soon as you are ready to begin the interview process.

Good luck!

Summer break is a great time to work on an idea to pitch when classes resume in the Fall. There are many good reasons to spend the time including: 1) practicing what you learned about company analysis and accounting is an excellent way to prepare for your Fall semester classes, 2) developing a narrative around your stock analysis gives you awesome talking points for next summer’s internship or full-time job interviews (they’ll be starting soon and there is no better demonstration of your technical competence and passion for investing than describing a company you’ve analyzed), 3) pitching can be a differentiator if you plan to interview for AEMR or ASAP, UW’s two competitive and limited enrollment applied investments classes, 4) pitching is also the only way you can earn the coveted PA vest and impress all your friends, and, of course, 5) it’s fun!

Finding an idea can seem daunting when you are just starting out, so we want to provide some guidance to help get you going (you can also review the Identifying and idea slides in the Training sessions folder on the CMC OneDrive – access is through the Resource Guide under FOR MEMBERS on the website).