 Hi everybody, I'm Susan McTairnan and I have the pleasure of serving as Dean of the Covelli School of Business here at Roger Lee's University. I have had a chance to say hello to a lot of our alumni already today. It's great to have you all with us and I see some other familiar faces as well as parents and friends and faculty of the Covelli School and I welcome you all here this afternoon. I am so sorry about the rain. We did the best we could to hold it off but didn't, all those prayers didn't work. We're now starting on the graduation prayers for sunny day so if those of you who are planning to be here on the 20th commencement could join with us so that we don't have a day like this it would be really helpful. This is one of my favorite events of the year. It seems like we were just together in December listening to the research and the analysis and the results of the investment program at the Covelli School Cafe, the Center for Advanced Financial Education. This is an extremely hardworking and talented group of students and I know firsthand because I've seen all the buzzing in our building leading up to this big event that takes place once a semester and I want to thank them ahead of time for all of the great work that's led to us being together here today. I know it's going to be an exciting and interesting afternoon and I want to also mention that for time planning purposes we do have a little reception plan for after this so we can talk with the students about their strategies or about anything else that those of us from the business school be around as well to talk individually with people and if you have questions about the program I'm happy to answer them or Dr. Melton is happy to answer them and I want to say a special thank you to Dr. Michael Melton who has been the catalyst behind this program and the founder of the program and this is always a great afternoon so I thank all the students I want to introduce to you now Chris Gilman and Adam Tolanico who are the associate directors of the cafe clubs and they'll be getting the presentation started. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this semester's cafe presentation. We'd like to start by introducing to you the 10 student fund managers standing for you. To my right is Frank DeQuitis, Clay Casiano, Chris Aquina, Frank Golden and Al Mendez. To the left we have Zach Moran, Anthony D'Amico, Sean Sweeney, Aaron Kenney and Charles Moyer. Now as you will learn the student fund managers have a unique opportunity to manage two real dollar equity portfolios with different objectives. One being a growth fund while the other a value fund. As many of you know traditionally we present both the portfolio methodology and performance of each fund. However today we're going to mix things up a little bit and focus just on our growth fund. Why you might ask to put it simply the performance on both a raw and risk-adjusted basis of the cafe growth fund through 2017 is unprecedented since the inception of this program. This success is largely due to the effort and determination of the gentlemen that you see behind us. We hope this presentation will not only walk you through our portfolio methodology but also highlight a few of the key companies that have helped make this semester so special. Without any further ado we'd like to invite up Clayton and Zach to begin the presentation. So what is growth? By definition a growth objective is where we search for stocks with a short term outlook in which we see capital gains. For example growth companies are more likely to take their profits and reinvest it back in their current business rather than pay this money back out to shareholders. This can fund such things as acquisitions and expansion projects in order to help drive growth in both the short and long term. Now taking this into consideration with us looking for more short term appreciation we do take on slightly more risk than we would if we were allocating to a value With the growth aspect of our objective we'd be slightly more risk tolerant. They need to understand with our holding period of just 10 weeks this can sometimes be nerve-wracking. When we're searching for growth companies for our fund to allocate we think of ourselves as fishermen with a large net once we cast this large net into the ocean we catch a multitude of different fish in which we inspect each and every one. By building our net with short term growth drivers we can ensure that we'll pick the best possible companies. We cast this net to ensure that we analyze every aspect that has the potential to move the stock price from the short term. From there we can properly use the current market conditions in order to turn in order to target the current industries that are thriving. So how bountiful has the catch been this year? Let's just say we caught the right fish at the right time. In short we try to minimize our risk while maximizing our return. In the end this gives us a portfolio that will outperform the market fulfilling our fiduciary responsibilities. Our year-to-date growth for our return is 9.07%. Our holding period for our return is 3.85%. It's important to notice that we are comparing very well against industry fund professionals such as Camco, Coleman Sacks, and J.P. Morgan. While our return is important to us we also like to take into account our fund on a risk-adjusted basis. Now we apply the industry standard measure alpha into our performance. A common phrase used throughout the cap beta semester to motivate us has been seek out less sleep later. A saying is to put a testament each and every day. Now risk adjusted returns measures our performance based on our risk that we take on in our portfolio. Anyone can outperform the market in a bull market by taking on more risk as defined by beta or by taking on less risk in a bear market. Thus the only measure that should matter to an educated investor is risk adjusted. You see with the year-to-date output of 2.47% and holding period alpha of 3.13%, we are clearly outperforming the market on a risk-adjusted basis. Now we had a sharp ratio of 5.9 and the market had a sharp ratio of 0.26. This just illustrates that given the amount of total risk that we take on we're performing 25 times better than the market based on that measure. We are very proud of the hard work we put in this semester. Chris we're proud. Paul I'm so proud. And we can't wait to share with you how we've been so successful. Before we explain the lead to the success of the cafe growth on this semester we would first like to look at our portfolio weight statistics to give you greater insight into what it is we do from day one. Within our cafe objective we place actual emphasis on certain fundamentals that we feel the most important. These being beta, price to earnings, EPS growth and the peg ratio. We look for a high EPS growth rate as earnings directly affects the company's stock price in the short term. Price to earnings ratio is a multiple that shows what investor is willing to pay in order to get $1 for the company's earnings. Now typically look for companies trading with low PDA ratios. We know this is typically tough and such a bull market that so many companies are trading at such high premiums. In terms of beta we typically look for a number greater than one as our investors are willing to take on slightly more risk for the potential of higher returns. Now another risk metric that we look at is their deviation. This shows how stock moves on a daily basis. Now we need to make sure that every company within our company matches up to our risk tolerance levels. I'd like to invite Aaron and Charles to help me explain how economics plays a key role in our investment strategy. Now as Doc is always telling us, we must be constantly aware of the market dynamics at play in both our global and domestic market and also within our short term and our long term. During the first day as student fund managers we pulled the first of many all-nighters in which we analyzed key events, news, and forecasted every possibility in order to define global and domestic market drivers. In industry this is known as the top-down approach. We begin with a global and domestic market analysis and then move to specific sector and industry analyses. After we do this we simply have to choose the companies that are best positioned moving toward based on current market trends. Through this process we use fundamental behavioral and technical analysis. In this way, CAFE is sequential and that every process is carried out with the prior research in mind. This helps us understand key events such as the impact of the new Trump administration, rising interest rates, oil prices, and many other market events that made our time in CAFE especially interesting. Now over the course of the following week we had to put on our economist caps and perform our global macroeconomic analysis. Looking at every relevant economic indicator and also taking into account every bit of news that we could find on our global markets to stay up to date. During our global market analysis we analyze over 30 major markets including every economic indicator. These include GDP, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates as they give us a better overall view of the current economic environment of these countries as well as drivers they may have moving forward. Now although this is trying to be difficult for those of you to see in the back, I'm going to just take a minute to highlight one of these columns here as this is the most important thing to take away. Now red sales indicate a bearish outlook on that market while green sales indicate a bullish outlook. And since we have more bearish outlooks on our international world view, we saw that we did not want to allocate to there as there's too much uncertainty regarding events like the French election, Brexit, and also the decreasing value of the euro. Within our analysis we also looked into the country's reporting standards. So for example countries like Italy and Russia, they don't fully disclose information on their financial statements, so we had a bearish approach to these countries. And to add to these disclosure issues, we also saw issues with ADRs or American deposit rate receipts not tracking their underlying assets in foreign markets. And I give a little background, ADR lets an investor put their money into a foreign market on their own domestic exchange. And we saw issues with them not tracking. For example, your foreign asset, the ADR supposedly tracks may go up 10%, but the ADR that you hold may only appreciate five. And this could be a nightmare for any potential investor going abroad to put their money in. Based on these global economic factors, we narrowed our view to our domestic market. But to justify this, we had to perform a thorough domestic market analysis. Therefore we made we looked at 16 key major domestic economic indicators, such as housing starts, business sales and inventories, and GDP. We did this to look at the forecasted last trends and also the forecasted next trends too. And in addition to that, we also saw that the Federal Reserve was maintaining their goals of implementing their monetary policy to boost price stability and also employment as well. And this indicated that our domestic economy was the strongest one out of all the others. Based on these factors, regarding the domestic market, we then had to look for catalysts that would push our fund moving forward within the next year. Our domestic market was being driven by Trump's pro-growth policies, such as increasing government spending in the areas of infrastructure and military spending, as well as a possibility of tax cuts that we have seen increase consumer sentiment throughout the semester. Therefore, after we concluded our domestic and global macroeconomic analysis, we were moderately bullish on the United States economy. As we saw that many of the major growth drivers presented a resider right here. Now many industry professionals in the room today are probably wondering why do we perform such a thorough global and domestic market analysis instead of simply picking countries that are hot today? Well, to answer that question, you have to understand that in CAFE the key word is drivers. And these drivers are identified in the top-down approach and they play a vital role in our decision-making. And also, we saw that as analysts, we got to be constantly aware of what's going around us and we got to know what sectors are driving the market today. So for example, if a sector like technology is driving the market, then the next thing an analyst has to ask themselves is what industry and what specific company within that industry is driving the whole sector. To give an example of this, within the tech sector, we saw an industry like Infastructure Software being driven by themes like cloud computing. Within this industry, we identified VMware, a network virtualization software company that was poised for growth moving forward. Thus, you have a vision of our top-down approach. Now before we get to our holdings, we want to let you in on a little secret that we had and let us accept such success. There are hundreds of other funds out there with the same objective and similar holdings to that of the CAFE growth fund. They might be wondering, why are we performing differently? Why would you want to invest in us rather than that of our competitors? Simply put, it's just the weightings that we put on each and every company. And how do we get these weightings, you might ask? The top-down analysis that we just performed. After the hours of research have been completed, the presentations have all been pitched and the voting is finalized. We are still not done with our portfolio allocation process. As it is now time to assign weightings to each and every security within our fund to ensure we are targeting the correct industries and matching our risk tolerance. After allocation, we overweight and other weighting sectors that we feel more or less comfortable in. So we overweighted two sectors, such as technology and out-of-the-air. The reason for overweighting technology is not only because of their dominance in the market as of late, but also because of key growth drivers backing them, such as cloud computing, in and out of things, and also autonomous driving. As Clayton has mentioned, we've also overweighed the healthcare sector. As at the time of our allocation, we saw it as undervalued and sought short-term price appreciation opportunities. Yet on the other hand, we underweight sectors that were a lot less confident in. So as you can see, we underweighted energy and consumer staples. We underweighted energy due to the fact that the commodity oil has been dragging the price of energy companies down. We've also underweighted consumer staples as it's usually seen as a defensive sector and we didn't see quite as many possibilities for short-term capital gains. These sector allocations are crucial to our client. It's overweighting those sectors that outperform the market helps us gain alpha. Inversely, underweighting those sectors that lag within the market hedges us against their poor performance. As you can see, we have a sector weighting scheme that takes a slightly more aggressive approach. This is due to things such as our objective as well as our currently bullish outlook on the current market and economy. As you'll see, we've taken the liberty to give each and every one of you a pen, so we do encourage you to write down some of the tickers that we go through. However, just know, even if you write these down, you'll never have the same particular weightings that this one does. It's now time for our big reveal as we will show you each and every holding within our growth fund that has led us to the alpha we are presenting to you today. As you can see, we're very proud of our holdings that we have and you might see only four of them had negative holding period deals. However, we know going to the future, these companies will have the growth drivers to back them and take them to get gains. For those of you in the back, don't worry. Inside your folder, you've been provided a cafe growth fund fact sheet that shows our holdings in their entirety. Now, without further ado, I would like to go into our portfolio as I call up Brent and Anthony to discuss one of our top holdings, Lamb Research. A company that is a key representation of growth is none other than Lamb Research. Lamb Research is a semiconductor manufacturing company that produces wafer fabrication and then we equip. They essentially make the chips that power most of our phones and electronic devices. Lamb Research made into our fund based on their outstanding fundamental metrics, as compared to their direct competitor applied materials. Now, Lamb exhibits strong increasing and decreasing trends we look for in a growth company, such as a low peg and a low PE. Additionally, lamb has a high inventory turnover and gross profit margin. This tells us that lamb not only moves this inventory quicker, but also makes more profit for sale. Additionally, when comparing lamb to its direct competitor, applied materials and industry leader, lamb has clearly outperformed. With continued demand for memory chips and relating areas such as consumer devices, big data, autonomous vehicles and other tech related themes, we see lamb poise for growth in the future. It is this due diligence at the beginning of each semester in the cafe that ensures that we have the best growth companies moving forward. Additionally, fundamental metrics change over time, as seen with Lamb Research being the better poise growth company now going forward, compared to AMAP, a company that's been previously held by prior cafe groups. Although fundamentals are the basis for any great company, Clay and Zach will take you through how we ensure we pick a winner. Now, we need to keep talking to you guys about technology companies, but Adobe was what we really wanted to bring to you. You guys might be familiar with Adobe by the annoying pop-ups you get on your computer every other day. However, this company is much more than that. When the technology sector is imperative that companies continue to innovate in order to thrive and outpace their competitors. This is exactly why Adobe has performed so well during our holding period, but more importantly, is so positioned for growth in the future. We all know Adobe, as we utilize their products each and every day. Some services you might be familiar with from Adobe are Adobe Reader and Adobe Photoshop. However, going forward, they're changing their entire business to be more of a subscription-based service rather than just licensing their software. More importantly, Adobe is currently growing two of their highest innovation product segments, which include their cloud marketing service and mobile segment. Kumbak also, Adobe displays great financial trends positioned for growth, as you can see by these annual operating cash flows. If you look, these mirror that of a stairway, or as we like to joke, a stairway to Alfa. Now, these two factors combine to create a very strong earnings history for Adobe. Over the past eight quarters, Adobe's begun EPS all eight times, while also being analyst's estimations of revenue, the past six of eight quarters. As Zach was talking about, we were so confident within Adobe that we actually held it while we were halfway across the world in Japan as it went into our earnings. So as we saw, overnight, it beat earnings per share, revenues, and also at a favorable guidance going forward. And I actually appreciated 3.81% just overnight. And that's the short-term gains we love our growth. I can speak for my fellow student fund managers. What I say is, analysts in the cafe, we live and breathe financial statements. I'd like to call up Alec and Sean, as they tell you another example of our holding footlocker and also how it utilizes industry specific ratios. Here, I'd like to give you all a brief insight into what it is to look at a company's financial statements. As you can see, this can be quite tough to locate specific data for a company. Luckily, when you utilize platforms such as Bloomberg, easily to locate this data and graph it accordingly for research. When observing a company's financial statements, we look at the creditability, profitability, activity, and leverage ratios. These types of ratios show if a company has cash, can pay off debt, and if they're operating effectively. Several key ratios that we look at include the talent equity, inventory turnover, and the current ratio. Now, I know that everyone in this room has at least been a footlocker once or twice. Now, let me tell you why this is one company that you need to hold within everyone of your funds. Footlocker, a specialty retail shoe store, has been significantly outperforming its peers within a struggling brick and mortar industry. When looking at retail, one key element you have to work at is same-store sales. This is a competitor of revenue generated by existing stores of a company during the same time a year ago. Currently, in the S&P in retail, there are only eight companies that have put that metric positive in the last four quarters. Footlocker, on the other hand, is in positive same-store sales in the last 28 quarters. Their direct competitors, such as finish line and Dick's sporting goods, are inconsistent when it comes to this ratio, showing us that footlocker was the one that we wanted to hold within our fund. Now, another element to look at in this sector, especially within discussion area, is the cyclicality of a stock. With Footlocker, there's a strong trend favoring this company to cause one and four. This is where Footlocker generates most of sales. There's still a factor such as the holiday season. Now, you might be wondering why we decide to invest in Footlocker outside their successful holiday season. As you can see with their earnings per share increasing on a year-over-year basis in quarters two and three, they're poised for growth, not only during the holiday season, but for the entire year. They've also shown immunity to industry-specific trends. As you can see that their total sales are increasing year-over-year. Now, I want to make attention over to our telecom. Now, within the telecom sector, we have limited options when investing in the domestic market. But T-Mobile was a clear winner. Now, just by show of hands, how many people use T-Mobile for their wireless carrier? Not that many. But don't worry, this company is poised for growth. In a few years, everyone will want a piece of this company. T-Mobile was a great candidate for our growth fund, as I had a great EBS growth rate, a low peg, and a solid beta. Not to mention, they were stealing market share from big names like AT&T and Verizon. We position ourselves in this company because it has far more growth potential than any domestic or global telecom company. It's also important to note that this company outperformed our key metrics we look for compared to its competitors like Verizon. Now, we see T-Mobile as a strong company moving forward, as they increase their cap extending, increase their earnings, and increase their revenue licenses. And the market is heavily driven by what's SpectrumMune. So essentially, a spectrum gives you the right for a certain frequency at a location. And companies like T-Mobile and Verizon buy these spectrums, so they can have that frequency at that location. So companies can purchase these spectrum licenses and get a range of frequencies from low to high. So typically, companies go for the low frequencies, as these are the better service frequencies. And they can travel through buildings and cities, which is what makes them better. So typically, the big names, such as AT-Team Verizon Global Spectrum Licenses, however, we'd like to note that T-Mobile spent a whopping eight billion dollars this year to acquire solid market share in the low frequency game. So we see them as a strong competitor moving forward. I know that you all want to call T-Mobile right now, but I do ask you to wait as we have Clayton and Chris come up and talk about Raytheon. Well, you may never buy a Raytheon missile by getting into our phones, but you can get two of these on this airspace and defense machine. Raytheon has been a company that has been fueling our fun as we've seen it training a lot of behavioral news. With all the positive news and contracts surrounding Raytheon, we had no choice but to set our sights on this great company. Now Raytheon, an integrated defense company that distributes military-grade equipment to international governments, as well as private contractors, was one of our winners this semester. As we've seen many companies in the industrial sector kind of stagnate or trade congestion after the so-called Trump bump, we've seen Raytheon only go higher off behavioral news. We actually recently saw the U.S. increase their product usage of Raytheon's products such as the Tomahawk missile. Now, investors saw this news and increased their stake in the company, allowing a stock price to increase. Now we've been telling you how this company is performed for us. Let me tell you why it's one of the best growth companies going forward. With increased geopolitical tensions, as well as increased military spending, we know Raytheon will be one of the best growth companies to hold your fault. So news isn't the only behavioral aspect that we look at when it comes to our growth fund. We also go into things like the habits of consumers. One company who has benefited greatly from the changing consumer spending habits is Amazon. Now, working as an online bookstore just a few years ago, turning to a company that has cornered the e-commerce market, just imagine where they'll be a few years from now. Amazon is the essence of the growth company, as it constantly adapts to changing consumer needs, updates its user-friendly platform, and not to mention its increasing stock price. Now with millions of consumers having online accessibility to purchase products anywhere at any time, Amazon has reaped the benefits from this tremendously. One growth driver Amazon has moving forward is their diversification in the revenue segments. So I'm sure most of you think as Amazon has a e-commerce store, however they also have their foot in cloud computing. Approximately over 6% is in cloud computing now. Over the past few years they've gained heavy market share in this industry and we see them as a market leader moving forward. With Amazon expanding upon the diversification amounts of revenue segments, there's many reasons why we are so bullish on this company in the coming years. While we typically take companies long, we also like to play a little short term gains and we do that through playing companies earnings. One of the differentiating factors between the cafe program and that of our peers is the student fund manager's ability to play earnings. Playing earnings basically means that we purchase a stock the day before their quarterly earnings report, in anticipation of a positive price movement after. Doc stresses we play earnings for two reasons. One, it makes us look at a multitude of factors within a company such as whether it will be earnings per share, revenues, and have a favorable guidance going forward. But he also makes us do it because it doesn't get any more real world than this. Taking a company into earnings we can see depreciate X amount overnight. During our time at cafe, we have been 88% of our holdings reported hit earnings causing a positive price movement. Also what's more impressive is that a vast majority of these companies' direct competitors have missed on their earnings. Now I'd like to show you an example as we talk about our earnings play, Hasbro. One company was added to our fund prior to their earnings was Hasbro. Now many of you may know Hasbro is one of the two major toy manufacturers on the market competing directly against Mattel. Chances are if you walk in any toy store today and pick up a product, it's most likely made by either one of these two companies. We discovered an inverse price reaction upon earnings between these two competitors. What this showed is that when one competitor missed, the other typically beat and had a positive price reaction the next step. After Mattel missed earnings and felt 12%, we identified this as investment opportunity for a company like Hasbro, who was also taking market share from Mattel within the toy industry. Now we were able to capture a 6.8% gain overnight while not getting greedy the next morning when the price was fluctuating between 5% and 8%. I'd now like to bring up Anthony and Aaron to talk about one of my favorite companies, Applying Technology. So we do play earnings in the short term but we also take our long holdings through earnings and this is a company we did this with is Align Technology. And the great thing about Align is when we were deciding to put them into our fund, we did it more so on a behavioral basis, deciding specific market dynamics at play. It's like the fact that they have very little direct competition and they had a very underpinned industry at play. Now initially the street had priced in a price target below what Align was trading at. However, after a solid earnings beat and a 27% price increase, the street quickly revalued. And another great thing about Align that made them a behavioral play for us was the effect of the ACA or Affordable Care Act. Now we would like to note that the GOP has recently introduced a new bill into Congress that has just passed through the House. But we would also like to note that this bill also includes teen dental health benefits as one of their essential benefits under their Align. And so the reason we like Align so much is because they've been mainly focusing their products and services on teen specifically, which is a rapidly growing market for them. And thus we think they're going to take this advantage more so than any of its peers. Now we see Align as a long term holding going further because they can diversify away from behavioral news. So after that I'd like to introduce the next group. So once fundamental and behavioral analysis is conducted, then you will find that ideal buying points for these solid selections are to increase our holding period. There are numerous technical indicators we use when conducting technical analysis. These indicators allow us to see, measure and explain certain price moves and trends in the stock. RSI or Relative Strength Index is an example of what these indicators allow us to see whether stock prices overbought or oversold at a certain time. When buying these warnings, we try to buy in when RSI is around the oversold level of 30, instead of the overbought level of 70. Another indicator is MACD, or Moving Average Convergence Divergence, one name. But this indicator tracks the momentum of a stock price movement. The area between the MACD line to the single line shows if this price movement is speeding up or slowing down. Now a good buying point is almost as necessary to stock price depreciation as water is to life. Now a company that deals with both these factors is Xilin Incorporated, a water treatment and flow control equipment company. Xilin is seen trading at a low in mid-April, where the RSI is showing that it's oversold. We took advantage of this buying point and days later the stock price appreciated. Not only is Xilin an example of a good technical play, we also see this company appreciating moving forward due to their initiatives in the U.S. water infrastructure remodeling. Finally we use Moving Averages to determine certain price trends in the stock. Simple moving average lines include short-term lines such as 10 to 20 day lines or long-term lines such as 50 to 100 day lines. Investors look for crossings on these lines as they can indicate the change in price trends. For SPGI, I did begin in February, its short-term moving average was crossing the other moving averages. We bought into this holding when the 50 day line was about to cross the 100 day line. This cross initiated an optimal buying point for us. For a company that we saw benefiting from increased bond issues volume. Just adding to their growth potential. Now, another play that we'd like to mention is UNH here. As we have to be constantly aware of the market dynamics at play and also note when a good buying point presents itself and that's exactly what happened here with UNH. You see urgency is really needed within the cafe so we can react quickly to the market environment because it's always changing and very unpredictable. After a fundamental behavioral analysis, identified this healthcare giant's stock pours to take off. We became technicians. We saw that stock was trading in congestion zone for roughly two months before it fell 3.67%. And this brought it back down to its level of support indicated here from which it rose with strong momentum. And after we bought in, we were able to capture some of this momentum and thus we were rewarded with a 6.86% price appreciation. Now let us explain why this Dow stock is still positioned for growth. With increased Medicare enrollment and aging population and their often segment that is revolutionizing the way individuals receive care at home, this company is worth holding throughout the remainder of the year. Not to mention, it's got the best Medicaid plans in the industry. As you can see reflected in the white line here, it has been outpacing Anthem, its direct competitor and managed care industry for some time now. Now with the technical analysis, it goes farther than just watching for a stock price that hit a level of support. We have to utilize intraday technicals like VWAP to find a more precise buy-in point. JPMorgan Chase, a blue-shift money center bank provides financial services and retail banking all across the globe. More importantly, it is an example of a company where we are able to utilize our volume-weighted average pricing metric or the VWAP to identify an optimal buy-in point. The VWAP ought to see real-time upticks and downticks. We ought to find a perfect buy-in point. For JPM, we want to price move down from 8610 down to 8572, where we identified a level of support and what she bought to its holding. After buying in, we saw the price increase to 8575. We are able to immediately capitalize on these price gains. You're probably thinking that all these gains seem kind of minimal, but when dealing with large crimes of money, it makes all the difference in the long run. This is just another example of technical analysis that's allowed us to see price appreciation as soon as the buy button was hit. Not always is an example of how I use it enough. JPM is consistent well over the upcoming years. With deregulation through possible dogfinger forms and also the increasing interest rate environment, JPM is being driven by strong economic growth drivers that will provide gains for the years to come. Now unfortunately, not all of our holdings can perform as we would like. This is seen here with prudential insurance as they have a holding period yield of below negative three percent. However, myself, my fellow sector analysts, Brent, are going to tell you why this company is still perfectly positioned for the future. Prudential is a multi-line insurer that focuses on life insurance, annuities, retirement services, and investment options for both institutional and individual clients. Through our top-down approach, we identified the insurance industry based on its prior performance through 2004 to 2006 and the last rising interest rate environment. With economists predicting two interest rate hikes of 25 basis points in the coming year, Prudential is the opportunity to capitalize on heightened reinvestments. Also identifying this macroeconomic factor with the demographic factor of an aging population that is going to kick-start the pension risk transfer segment, Prudential is still well positioned for growth. Based on these fundamental metrics, we see that Prudential is still poised for solid growth moving forward, compared to that of the overall insurance industry. With this being said, we feel well positioned within this industry moving forward with a company like Prudential. This is why we can ensure you that Prudential will be positive by year-end. So, another company that had underperformed in our short-term time horizon was Celgene. Now, Celgene, we would like to know, although underperformed the broader sector, we still did have a positive holding period deal for us. And what initially attracted us to them in the first place was the fact that they were in growing industries like immunology, oncology, hematology, and inflammation therapies. With our top-down approach, we indicated that the biotech industry had excellent growth moving forward due to increasing industry trends, such as cancer research and innovative therapies. And within the company itself, Celgene is making strides to become the next leader in the biopharmaceuticals industry on every frontier. Now, what we mainly attributed to Celgene's strength is its robust pipeline of new and developing drugs, as you can see here, which will propel the stock further in the future, more so than any of its competitors. Celgene was stealing market share with the drug Revlimid. Now, this is a blood cancer drug that's one of the best in the world. And in addition to that, that wasn't enough. We also see that they are increasing their partnerships and acquisitions to diversify away their revenue streams and also create a position for them where they can go into growing markets. In addition to that, now, maybe wondering, like, why invest in Celgene, the under-performed sector, and that didn't do so great within our fund, but we see that their market position, their pricing power, and their amazing performance over the last couple of years will propel them in the future and reach new higher highs. So now that we've brought you through some of our growth holdings, we'd like to take this time to review a few key points from the semester and begin to introduce our value fund. So as you guys and any good analysts know, one must always be self-evaluating and holding themselves accountable not just for the great trades, but for those decisions that didn't quite pan out. While we do see similar trends within the market, it's important to note that history does not repeat itself. This can be seen in the loyal market. In 2008, oil, along with the stock market, reached all-time highs. However, oil is currently trading at historically low levels as the market continues to reach new highs. In the cafe, we train analysts to make educated decisions based off of calculated probabilities. Through the analysis of historical trends, we look to see where the market is headed next based on where it has been in the past. One of the greatest lessons the student fund managers can learn is the different train of thought that goes into seeking value in a company over a longer time horizon. We'd like to note that due to the uncertainty of the Trump bump and the lack of clarity entering 2017, the Gabelli Value Fund was liquidated in December of 2016. This certainly added a amount of pressure to these analysts as they were now responsible for allocating an entire fund rather than just a few holdings. Additionally, because the Value Fund is allocated after the Growth Fund, we missed out on a large portion of the growth in quarter one of 2017. This can be seen in our year-to-day performance. So far, through 2017, we've returned 4.86 percent on a raw basis, which not only puts us in line but ahead of many of our industry competitors. What we are thrilled to bring you guys today is our 22 basis points of alpha that have been generated since the allocation of this fund. This illustrates that these student fund managers have been successful in allocating a value portfolio towards the latter part of the semester under the constraints set by DOC. Now, I'd like to bring up CJ and Sean to touch on some of the key points in our Value Fund. Everyone talks about value. You hear from big name investors like Warren Buffett. So what exactly is value? In contrast to the Growth Fund, where we cast a wide net, Value Investing uses a single line designed to catch one fish that aligns perfectly with our front objective. Now, within Value, we focus on companies rather than the stocks themselves. Our goal is to find companies that are trading below their intrinsic value. Our buy and hold strategy allows us to capitalize on the fact that increasing cash flows and solid fundamentals will return a stock price to fair market valuation if not exceed that in the near future. Yeah, I'd like to bring up my fellow student fund manager, Alec, just to touch on the correlation matrix in the Value Fund. Now, one model that we placed extra emphasis on within our Value Fund is our correlation matrix. This shows the direct correlation between any two companies within our fund. As we do have a longer term approach with this fund, we want to make sure that no two companies are moving in the exact same way. The support to know because if you want to invest between two companies that are highly correlated, it's not worth investing both these companies, rather than just one of them. Even both these companies have vastly different operations if they both move the same way in the market, you will not be properly diversifying your portfolio. And properly diversify the funds, which has as many negative correlations as possible. We are very proud of this model and feel that every one of these companies is poised for growth in the next three to five years. Now, I'd like to bring up Anthony so we can talk about how your fund returns. We allocated our fund on April 4, 2017. Now, we like to track our funds against different indices, depending on their objectives. For example, we track our value fund against the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average. Now, to give you a little insight on our performance in this portfolio, we performed a holding period yield of 22 bits positive and a year-to-date yield of negative 1.46 percent. Now, we'd like to know that this is on a risk-adjusted basis. Now, another notice, our year-to-date is rather low. This is due to us elegantly overly exposed to financials when the financial sector took ahead. However, when we completed our final allocation into the value fund, our outfit greatly improved due to our proper allocation among the other sectors. Our comparison of performance against other competitors was also in line with the expectations, regardless of this very performance. Now, we know you guys are going to hate to see this presentation and just as much as we'll hate to leave this fund, but we feel you have enough tickers on your piece of paper to sort of speak go and start your own fund if you'd like. I'd like to give the floor to Clay and Zach to give a final remark. Now, you may be asking how is the cafe capable of this performance? After all, we became student fund managers just three short months ago. The secret behind cafe and what makes it so special is that we do everything in a way that directly replicates industry. Clay will begin to explain this as we take you through our hierarchy of management. At the top, we have our executive director, Dr. Michael Bellin followed by our managing director, Ms. Carla Puccini, then followed by two associate directors, Mr. Chris Gilman and Mr. Adam Delmonico. Through this hierarchy, we're able to effectively communicate every single day and be able to successfully and actively manage two funds. This is not the only way we mirror industry hybrid. As you can see, we're required to wear a suit and tie every day to promote a professional workplace. Also, student fund managers are given the privilege to utilize industry level platforms in order to increase their skill set and familiarity. In the cafe, we use Bloomberg Terminals for industry standards. We also use Money.net for real-time data as well as technical indicators and we use Zacht reports to compare our industry analysis to those industry. When we first stepped into the cafe, we knew that this was no normal classroom setting. Doc had transformed from a professor to our boss and for the first times in our academic career, we had to act as analysts, not students. Every task, every question, and every assignment that was given to us was done with due diligence and handed in exactly on time. Of course, other institutions do manage real dollar portfolios, but how many of them can boast that they managed two real dollar portfolios with differing objectives while managing them through an active management strategy? We know in this industry you need something to take you to the top and we feel like cafe definitely makes us stand out and we cannot thank our director Dr. Michael Melton enough for the knowledge that he has passed on to us. Lastly, cafe has taught us to work together. As a student fund manager staying before me, we're all strangers just three months ago and now we can all safely say that we are one big family. We thank you for listening to our presentation and we would love to open up the floor to any questions that you might have. Let's start with the Q&A. I do have to point out one student, Anthony D'Amico was the first ever mechanical engineer ever to be in the program and he actually has a final stone presentation so we can't stay right now for the Q&A but he did a fantastic job throughout the semester including the powder over himself. Thank you. Now we'd like to open up the floor to questions. We've ultimately started with $95,000. If you're looking for a percentage or give me returns I'll put it 10% today. We are currently managing around $106,000 right now. So that is $5,000. Talk. First of all, a great job out there guys. So my question was what would you say is the most difficult macroeconomic or political trend that you guys face? So I think for us it was obviously the political uncertainty in not only in the hero zone but also geopolitically with events like North Korea and other macroeconomic trends so although we had to take these into account when we put certain tropical statistics on these events occurring we then manage our bond actively throughout this and we position ourselves in that way and go forward. You mentioned earnings can you talk maybe about how much you learn from earnings calls what you look for on them and what you want to look for? Yeah, so when we look at earnings calls the reason we look at the calls is because for the question and answer segment we really want to see what's being asked and what's being asked over again. Also when we go into earnings it's a little company specific because each company especially with growth really has a specific area that's driving it so we want to target that and see how that aspect's doing. If I could touch on that a little bit you also like to listen to the management and see how confident they are within their own answers and the questions because that definitely if they dance around questions a little bit it can seem a little bit less poised for your own future. Excellent presentation guys. What was the biggest challenge that you as a do face this sense of? Definitely at times the cohesion especially during the late late nights wasn't out there. The hardest part is getting everyone on one page when it does happen and all the cohesion is there. We are our most efficient unit you could possibly have. So first off congratulations on the results and the presentation. So was there a negative was there ever a negative experience with these earnings play? You sound very very successful at bringing results such as the example of what he must have learned that was a massive loss. Oh yeah so one company that we did take their earnings that was our value fund was Intel and what we saw with them was that we're still very confident with them going forward however their client computing their segment got hurt a little bit means less people and people are more apt to go out on my PCs. So we did see that guidance move forward bring them down but we're still very confident with that going forward. But what's the participation for Shopify that you seem to have or you don't? Yes. So Shopify we were trying it was towards the end of the semester we were trying to decide if we wanted to do an earnings play and then Shopify was a company we were looking at since basically February the fundamentals typically aren't your cafe fundamentals but since we were putting 2.5 percent of our funding in we felt confident that we were hedged against the risk with it and basically Shopify is a online e-commerce platform maker so there's a huge demand for them there and actually within the two weeks we held them we made about seven percent. Short-term holding growth fund somewhat tax-intuitive for most investors taxable in that case I'm sorry can you repeat that word with us? I was saying isn't it somewhat tax-intuitive on the growth fund with the short-term holdings and realizing short-term capital needs of ordinary tax payers as opposed to longer holdings? That's wonderful. Now if I may answer that gang one of the benefits that we have to be the projects interested is that we are tax exempt. We are tax exempt. In terms of the way that the student fund manager probably addressed that question too is to be able to talk to a little bit more with regards to our turnover ratio how our turnover ratio is still lower than that of industry right now so of our direct competitors thus we see that from a taxable basis we're doing much better even if we wanted to include that into our savings and into our returns which is obviously what is taxable and most of all looking at an after-taction term. Absolutely, yes. Yes, so we were very fortunate for the study that we were doing by the way. Great presentation guys. To the regards to T-Mobile and the value fund what are you guys seeing that's the private value that's the catalyst that's stored between the institute and the building and that's what we said. All right so when it came to T-Mobile and the value fund we looked at all the telecom companies in the sector and there were certain fundamentals that we couldn't adhere to with DOC within the semester so that's where we saw the little growthy value within our value fund is never a bad thing. A little bit too in terms of T-Mobile going forward Verizon, Sprint, AT&T they're all following the same model right now in terms of tremendous capital expenditure way more than T-Mobile right now and the trend going in with T-Mobile is their CEO is unique trying to reinvent things John McGear is I think poised to really make that company succeed rather and going forward I think that DOC he will mainly be the driver in terms of runoff to rejuvenate my company for a second. Great presentation guys it really was fantastic to see the sleep to grab and he got some nice seats. Was there ever a situation in which you guys maybe made the correlation matrix or somebody was really excited about his stock and he got voted out or sort of a really difficult situation where you had to sort of kick out a holding you know or it didn't really fit within your strategy even though you thought that from a bottom-up perspective it might have been really great. Okay so a situation where a stock I kicked out during our value pitch week was with Surner the stock I pitched I just love the company was in that the right industry for healthcare and I was really passionate about it just all the growth drivers going forward with it but we saw they were losing market share to other companies and some of the other fund managers brought on the consensus that maybe it wasn't the best time to get into Surner even though I did identify all the different value aspects of the great fundamentals great great industry to be and in general and I think that's more one area we disagreed on but yeah that does happen from time to time and I'll touch on that too I mean from us having done this a couple of times Carla's been through this a few times we've all been through it we all have those companies that we love and that we pitch constantly Zach was talking my year off about Shopify since February we all have we all have those companies so there's definitely a lot of that it's all just about the Socratic method and really trying to get those and prove that they're the right company for the fund you mentioned in the presentation that you were able to go to to get some touch on that Japan was probably one of the best experiences I could say for all of us all of our lives it was incredible we actually got to go and present to the Tokyo Stock Exchange as well as to Toto Toilet Factory which they actually had their investor presentations that's us and we did to them as well because we went in there as if we were going to invest them for our value fund so Japan was was unreal we saw all the great sites yeah had some weird foods it was really really bad yeah so thank you for bringing it up we do want to thank MJX Asset Management and then also all of you cafe alumni I'm sure you guys for those of you who are at the luncheon you heard about the success of the Cafe Capital Campaign it's because of this and because of you guys' generosity that we were able to go to Tokyo it was an unbelievable experience Bank of Japan Tokyo Stock Exchange Toto Toilets yes we did go to a toilet so that experience is all thanks to the Cafe Capital Campaign and MJX Asset Management so we just want to thank you guys very much for that well I just want to thank all of you for a really really terrific job let's give them a round of round of remarks so that's okay we do always try to make a point at this presentation to extend a special thanks to the people who are very special friends to this program and two of them are Hans Christensen and Mario Cabello and Mr. Christensen has been a big supporter of the troops abroad that are characteristic of this program and that are just such incredible experiences for our students every time they take place and Mr. Cabello has been a friend to the school and has been the person who has been supportive of the Bloomberg technology that makes this program possible over a long period of time so even though they're not here I would like to give them a round of applause for all of you certainly not least this would never have been possible without Dr. Michael Melton some other business schools that have had student investing programs but usually they're managed really by J.P. Morgan or somebody but this fund is managed by our students they buy and they sell and they make those decisions and they work really hard so excellent job I hope everybody will be able to stay for a little while and visit with us there's a reception setup in Lafoyer outside you'll have more chance to talk with the students and hear about their great insights into investing and I hope you enjoy the rest of the afternoon thank you again for coming today congratulations