What happens when you let college students manage a 6 figure fund?
The answer, at least in the case of Carnegie Mellon’s ‘Tartan Student Fund’, might surprise you! For context, the Tartan Student Fund (TSF) is Carnegie Mellon’s premier student fund which offers undergraduate students interested in Finance the opportunity to manage a portfolio of equities worth a little over $100,000. It’s a long-only fund with an emphasis on stock pitching and fundamental valuation analysis, providing a pretty good extracurricular opportunity to apply some of the things we learn in our Finance coursework.
The fund is split into several teams of about 5 members, each covering a different sector of our holdings. I started out as an analyst for the Consumer Discretionary team during my first semester as a member before becoming Associate Portfolio Manager the following semester. For my last semester in the fund, I had the pleasure of leading the Technology Media & Telecommunications sector as a Portfolio Manager. Some stocks I helped pitch during my time in the fund included: Domino’s, Sony, and Spotify.
Anyways, the reason for this post is that I happen to come across an old copy of one our weekly coverage reports that I was responsible for at the time. The purpose of coverage was to adjust our holdings in response to recent news affecting those holdings. Most of the time the recommendations would just be to hold, but on rare occasions coverage could lead to the selling off of certain equities the fund believes to be… not so promising, to say the least. Thankfully none of the funds’ holdings within my sectors ever reached that point, though that did result in our Sunday morning zoom meetings being relatively non-eventful. Regardless, we definitely learned a lot on the research side of things which I’m grateful for. This specific report is from my time as the TMT Portfolio Manager, which had me and my team responsible for 7 different assets within the sector. I do hope to revisit this post with one of stock pitches I worked on, but in the meantime feel free to take a gander and/or visit the fund’s official site here !