Haas Team Wins Investment Competition Performance Prize

May 14, 2018
Global Network for Advanced Management

A team from Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkley has won Performance Prize in the 2017-18 Global Network Investment Competition, sponsored by the Yale School of Management’s International Center for Finance.

The team CALiforniaflation, had a commanding return of 28.82% with its portfolio, surpassing the returns of 22 other teams from 15 Global Network schools in the six-month competition which began in November. As the team with the best returns on its portfolio—defined as the gross return of a portfolio of stocks publicly traded in the team’s home country less the performance of the country’s capital-weighted stock market index—CALiforniaflation will receive a prize of $3,500.

Bhinneka Investment Group from Universitas Indonesia won the $1,500 second-place prize with a return of 21.6%.

Jake Wamala, one of the CALiforniaflation team members, said that after assembling its portfolio in November, the team members shared updates regularly in a group text message and also peeked at their competition’s portfolios, looking for investing ideas for the future. Wamala said his team was excited to win the prize, since many of them plan to seek careers in finance.

“The analysis and putting together a portfolio is an informative process,” Wamala said.  “Developing a sound strategy on how to pick [stocks] and the composition of the portfolio required higher-level thinking. I believe those are essential skills for working in a global marketplace where the winning strategy might not look like yesterday’s winning strategy.”

The Global Network Investment Competition is comprised of two parts: the Performance Prize and the Security Analysis Prize. Incatraz Investments won the $3,500 Security Analysis prize in March for its work analyzing the stock offering of Cemex Latam Holdings, a firm investing in cement products.