 Hello everyone. This is an introduction to the CFA Institute Research Challenge season 2020-2021 in Switzerland and Lechtenstein. We are Mirjana Wojtel and Olivia Müller from the CFA Society Switzerland University Relations Team and together with our colleague Florian Ester we organized the competition in Switzerland. We would love to visit you at your universities and talk to you in person but because this is not unfortunately possible we are recording the video. We hope that the video will reach many of you who are interested in participating in the competition and provide you with more information you need at this moment. It is our aim to convince you to join the competition starting this autumn. CFA Institute created a great video about the research challenge back in April 2019. We will leave the link to that video in the description box below. We highly encourage you to watch it. So what is research challenge? It is a global competition, global student competition in equity research. That means that the same format of competition is organized in more than 100 countries and by participating in our local competition you are joining the network of more than 6,000 students from more than 1000 universities that participate every year. How does the research challenge look like in Switzerland? Well the research challenge is organized by us University Relations Team from the CFA Society Switzerland in collaboration with local universities and CFA Institute. We start the competition in autumn and generally we do have 8 to 10 universities and universities of applied sciences participating every year with something between 25 and 30 teams. Competition ends in February when one team is selected, a Swiss winner to represent Switzerland and Liechtenstein in the EMEA regional final where it gets to compete with teams from 40 other universities for a title of EMEA champion. This is the list of universities who participated and continue participating in research challenge every year. We are continuously working on onboarding more universities. Students take the position of a research analyst researching on a company. They have essentially two deliverables. The first deliverable is a research report 10 pages plus appendix like a an initiation report in a cell site business. The second deliverable is an investor presentation. Students have to present in front of a very senior board of judges and convince them about their recommendation like if they were investors. The company they have to research on is a company that exists in Switzerland that is listed on the Swiss exchange and that has agreed to actively participate with CEO, CFO or even a company visit. On this slide you see our track record. We started 11 years ago in the technology space with Myriad. Then we went to the media sector with Tomadia. Then we had actually only one consumer which was Orior. Then we went to the automotive and component space, Autoneum. Then we had three companies of the Mettech sector, Sunova, T-Con and Strauma which we visited. Then we went back to the technology area with Ascom. Then with VAT and actually with VAT two years ago our Swiss team became global champion. Then we stayed within the technology space Lundisen Gear and there we were again very successful. Our team went to the global finals and we just finished a couple of days ago the last season with U-Blocks. How does it work here? Well it is a student competition as a team. Students build teams of three to five students, not less than three, not more than five and work during the entire winter term on their research project. We organize it together with our partners and our most important partners are of course the universities, your professors and the professors usually embed the CFA challenge into a seminar or a lecture and give to you ECTS credits. On our side we help universities by providing to them practitioners who hold guest lectures about topics that are relevant for you students to succeed. Those topics could be sales, could be presentation, could be equity research, could be also portfolio management and a variety of other topics. Each team works supported by their professor, the faculty advisor and by a mentor which we provide as well. They work throughout the entire winter term on doing the research work so there is a lot of number crunching, a lot of researching, like if they were a really existing sales side analyst. Universities present their best team at the Swiss local final, if they have more than one team at the beginning they have to select their best team in December, taking into consideration the quality of their presentation and the quality of their report and I think this is another great opportunity to practice presenting. The finalist team per university then attends to the Swiss local final that takes place as Mirjana said in February. The jury board they have to present in front of is a high profile panel of heads of research, senior portfolio manager, head of asset management, chief investment officers from Switzerland's top firms and then the Swiss local champion basically gets nominated, is the winning team, gets a reward, gets a trophy and then travels to the EMEA regional final at a location which is typically in the EMEA region. We give special prizes for those teams who have delivered the best report and for those who have delivered the best presentation. This is the outcome of the 2019-2020 challenge. There were 117 local challenges, roughly as many countries. All those local challenges took place during the winter term. Every country could send its best team, its local champion to the EMEA regional finals. This year it was virtual but it should have taken place in Amman, Jordan. There the best teams compete against each other resulting in two EMEA champions. These two EMEA champions, these were this year Lausanne and BI Norway Business School, compete against the champions from the other regions being from APAC and from the Americas. At the global final of course then the global final champion is crowned and this year it was the University of Sydney with their difficult case on Commonwealth Bank of Australia. These students, this is really a tremendous challenge. It gives you real-life experience as an equity analyst. Everything is real. You take place at an investor's day, you can ask questions to a CFO, to a CEO, you can watch quarterly results, you can attend conference calls, so you really get in-depth experience and also training into company analysis. Dear students, if you want to succeed, being good at technicals only partially helps. The real difference are the soft skills and those are developed as well such as teamwork, presentation skills, story lining like in real world. If you have succeeded on your CFA challenge you get a certificate from us which we recommend to add to your CV and I can promise to you a campus recruiter seeing this certificate will know how much work you have invested and what this means. You get mentoring and you get a fabulous platform. Credit Suisse through its campus recruitment unit is sponsoring the challenge and I can assure you the campus recruiters will be very close to you but you also get the fabulous networks with other clean employers, professionals and peers to open your doors into the financial services industry and of course for the Swiss local champion team they can travel to the EMEA regional final and eventually even to the global final and that is quite an experience. For instance two years ago at the global finals I was personally with the team and I took them to Wall Street and I took them to the trading floor of Credit Suisse and it was really a great experience for them. This is the schedule. Couple of months ago we expect to announce the challenge in Switzerland early August at the beginning of the winter semester we will make the name of the subject company public that will again be a very interesting well-known company which has agreed to come with the CO and CFO. There will be a kickoff on the 1st of October in the afternoon in Zurich at the university then in November there is a special conference call for you. You can submit questions you can ask questions to the CFO. During the winter term October November December you work on your report like a normal analyst will basically do. If you have more than one team per university there is a presentation round within the university which gives you another training in presentation skills. By early January you have to hand in your first real deliverable which is the research report. We ask you to hand it in in two versions. One is completely anonymous i.e. without your name without the name of your university and without any reference to you. This is for grading purposes and the other one is of course with your with your name. The first will be graded by 8 to 12 graders out of our society. These are all investment professionals, equity research analysts and they grade your report on a completely anonymous basis. In early February we take all Swiss finalist teams to a location near Bern and organize for them a bootcamp in presentation skills. We hired a professional presentation trainer for two days to give you a real boost in presentation skills, presence but also story-lining. In mid-February you have to hand in your presentation of course with the input from the bootcamp. On the 18th of February that will be the Swiss local final, the finalist teams present in the afternoon and in the evening the Swiss local champion is crowned alongside with the special prices for the best presentation and the best report. The team that advances to the EMEA regional gets another month to prepare for the EMEA regional and the EMEA regional takes place roughly early April 2021 and the global final takes place roughly end of April 2021. The global final will be in New York but the location of the EMEA regional is not yet known. Now as organizers of the competition we are delighted to hear that students participating in the competition appreciate and are highly satisfied with their experience and they're mostly happy with the practical experience in equity research they receive for the first time. The fact that they upgrade their CVs that they are better presenters after the competition that they broaden their industry network and some of them are directly recruited from the competition but to be very honest with you this is not an easy challenge. The feedback we received from some of the students is that they worked 150 plus hours and some of them even worked 600 hours. A few of students felt that this was not properly or fairly rewarded by the number of credits they received from their universities and before we finish this presentation I would like to remind you of one thing that Oli already mentioned. This is not a technical competition only. You all have great knowledge to write great research reports. This is about soft skills so typically teams that are better than others are those who can present well who can sell their recommendation to the judges and those who work very well in the team. So if you do have an interest in participating in the competition we strongly advise you to ask your friends and ask colleagues you already work with already now to form teams. If you have any further questions please feel free to reach out to any of us, myself or Florian. Our contact details are on this slide or contact us at researchchallenge at swiss.ca. Thank you very much for listening to this presentation. We hope to see you in autumn. Bye bye. See you soon. Cheers.