Finance students in the past have participated in national student competitions. They are a great opportunity to practice and further your knowledge and skills you learned in the finance program at PSU. Because not all of you are finance major, grading will be generous as long as you follow the instructions (e.g., number counts for answers). In addition, it’s not a technical assignment. It’s an opportunity to look back and evaluate what you have learned, how they can be useful, and what else you should learn. Remember you chose finance as your major because you like something about finance. Follow your passion and keep learning what excites you, and you will have a bright future ahead of you. This is the last assignment of this course. Thank you for working hard in this course for the past 7 weeks.
Hint: You may Google search something like “student competitions in finance”.
National Investment Banking Competition
Competitors from the most reputed finance schools in the world come together to compete at NIBC.
Competition includes Undergraduate and Graduate/MBA candidates
There are two rounds:
First round - Teams of 2-4 producing Corporate Valuation & Strategic Review Oct/Nov 2019 - Jan 2020
Final Round - Finalists giving Transaction Advice to Panel of Managing Directors March 10-13, 2020 Vancouver, Canada
NIBC aims to offer students from all backgrounds an opportunity to advance their investment banking careers
https://nibclive.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NIBC-2019-2020-Competition-Overview2.pdf
Investing is such an important skill to have and this would be a really interesting learning experience. It would also be really amazing to go to Canada, I’ve never been.
I would look into the investment side of camera companies because I have my own photography business, and it would only seem right to look into this industry. There is a lot of success in the camera industry and also in the smartphone industry. There is a concept in R studio called “Momentum Investing with R” and it does the following: “In practice, momentum entails a look back into the past to determine whether an asset has exceeded some benchmark and if it has, buy and hold that asset for some time into the future.” With this information, we could see if investing in the camera or smartphone camera industry would be a good investment.
There are so many different code chunks that we learned in financial modeling that would be beneficial, but for this project, the group_by(ticker) would be extremely helpful for pulling information on select companies such as Canon or Apple. After finding all of this information it would be important to visually show it on a graph so that’s when the ggplot function becomes important. With the select function, we can also look at certain sections of data and learn about the details that make a company a good investment or not based on their performance. Putting all of this together would help this project be successful.
In this class along with Business Statistics I have been able to apply my knowledge in Rstudio to show findings of different kinds of data in all realms. Correlation plots and bivariate graphs were both beneficial to showing data findings in Business Statistics. These concepts could easily be used to help this Investment Banking Competition be successful. The last thing I enjoyed learning about and would benefit this project is Cluster plotting data because you can clearly see how a company is doing when all the data is laid out. This is the only class that I would find beneficial in investing other than Financial Management, but that class was extremely hard, so time spent finding information relating to that course would be tedious for me.
Hint: The author of the blog writes articles on financial analysis using R. https://rviews.rstudio.com/categories/reproducible-finance-with-r/
The finance blog contained the article that I was talking about in question 6. The article was “Momentum Investing with R” and after looking at the other postings, this seemed to be the only one that pertained to the Investment Competition. By looking at past benchmarks in the market we can determine it will be a good asset in the future. There is so much to learn about the stock market and by applying data about the stock market to concepts in this posting into R studio we would be able to create an interesting project for the Investment Competition.
Overall everything I’ve learned at PSU would be the most beneficial resource to this project, but it would also be important to invest in the stock market during this time in order to learn more about the market and how it works. We can’t apply anything unless we learn with experience and by investing in the stock market we can learn a lot. Many think that you have to invest a ton of money into the stock market, and that just isn’t the case, because just by investing $5 over time can turn into so much over the years depending on where you invest your money. Having personal knowledge of investing would be so important in the success of this Investment Competition, so get out there and try it!