Q1 What is the title of the finance student competition you may consider competing? Hint: You may Google search something like “student competitions in finance”.

CFI Financial Modeling Case Competition

Q2 Describe the eligibility requirements, if any (e.g., undergraduate college student).

This is open to undergraduate college students, graduates, and professionals.

Q3 What are the competition criteria?

The description for this is to create a pitch for judges in order to make them decide if they want to invest in the business or not. You must build a financial model, create a presentation, and finally create a 5 minute video.

Q4 What is the deadline for the submission?

The competition takes place from October 18th to October 25th.

Q5 Why are you interested in this competition?

This competition interests me because there is a $10,000 cash pool for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Also this would be a great way in order to gain real experience and show employers what you have to offer.

Q6 What would be a possible project you may turn in for the competition? Describe it in at least 100 words.

A possible project that I would turn in was whether or not to invest in Microsoft company. In the past couple of quizzes we have looked at a couple of things related to the Microsoft Stock. I could show the past couple of years returns and show the graph showing that Microsoft been steadily increasing. Also, I would find other companies that are competitors to Microsoft but are not performing as well as Microsoft. This would show the judges that Microsoft outperforms its competitors and is a great company to invest in.The 5 minute video would describe all of this in order to get the investors to want to invest in this stock.

Q7 List things that you learned in financial modeling course that could be helpful for your project in Q6. Describe it in at least 100 words.

In financial modeling there was a lot of useful tactics that I will find useful in order to complete this competition. Something that will be especially useful is using RStudio in order to quickly import data for a certain company. This will give me a better understanding of how a company performs for certain timeframes. Also, many of the formulas will be especially helpful when determining the risk of a company. For example, we can look at the Standard deviation and compare this to other companies to show why this company will perform better than other companies.

Q8 List things that you learned in other finance courses at PSU that could be helpful for your project in Q6. Describe it in at least 100 words.

Something that I learned in investing principles was different methods of valuation of a company. This would be important in this project because by determining if a company is over or under valued will be helpful when giving an investment recommendation. Also, in Financial Management I learned how to read Valuelines one pagers. This will be helpful because these give us a lot of information including the safety ratings, returns, and much more. The final thing I would find useful was the formulas for annualized returns for the company.

Q9 Check the finance blog below and see if you see any post that may be helpful for your project in Q6. Discuss how it can be helpful in at least 100 words. Hint: The author of the blog writes articles on financial analysis using R. https://rviews.rstudio.com/categories/reproducible-finance-with-r/

While I saw a many articles that looked like they would be helpful to my project one of the articles would be the “Introduction to Rolling Volatility”. This article will be useful because if you take the averages for 10-20 years and its positive it might not show volitility for a certain year. This will be great when showing whether the stock is going to be risky or not. Also, when comparing to other companies if the stock is more risky or less risky it will be easier to give a recommendation in order to decided whether or not to invest in the company.

Q10 List things that you think could be helpful but not taught/offered at PSU finance courses. Discuss how it can be helpful in at least 100 words.

PSU offers many things that will be helpful to this project. I can’t think of anything that PSU doesnt offer that would be helpful. There are many opportunities at PSU that are outside of classes including the Panther Pitch which would help with practicing public speaking for clients. All of the classes teach us everything we need in order to be successful in the project.