Bruin Value Investing club holds first stock pitch competition

This post was updated on Jan. 26 at 10:17 a.m.

Students dressed in business suits brought Wall Street action to UCLA on Friday as part of the first stock pitch competition for the Bruin Value Investing club.

Contestants had a week and a half since the kickoff event on Jan. 12 to prepare a stock pitch for any U.S. stock and to research and develop an argument about why it would be a good investment.

Almost 130 students in teams of three to four people took part in the event, said Mike Sanghvi, co-founder and president of Bruin Value Investing and a fourth-year business economics student.

The teams were expected to put in 50 to 60 hours of work, including research on the firm’s history and financial statements and creating presentations.

Four teams gave final presentations for the competition’s judges on Friday. Judges questioned the participants about their stock choices and asked how their chosen companies would be affected by changes in the economic performance of the country. Students also had to answer questions about the validity of their research.

The winning team pitched the stock of Tropicana Entertainment Inc., a company that owns and operates casino gaming properties in various states across the country. The team members were Kareem Dakak, a second-year business economics student, Garrett Klatte, a second-year mathematics/economics student. Sagar Desai, a second-year business economics student, and William Xiao, a third-year business economics student.

With the clock fast approaching the end of their 10-minute presentations, anxious students tried to condense their research to convince the judges that their stock pitches would provide the best returns.

Helen Gong, a third-year financial actuarial mathematics student who pitched the idea of investing in the oil company Halliburton, said her team approached the competition hoping to find a company that was undervalued and would experience an increase in price in the next few years.

Sanghvi said he thinks the stock pitch competition is important for UCLA because the university does not have an undergraduate business program. He added that he thinks investing is a rigorous, analytical and logical process, but students don’t have to be interested in the business world or financial markets to participate.

Sanghvi added that he thinks the judges, who included a UCLA professor and an alumnus who works with hedge funds, provided an interesting mix of investing ideologies to challenge the contestants.

Gong, one of the finalists at the competition, said she thinks the event was a great way to help students gain basic financial knowledge.

“Everyone needs to deal with money at some point in their lives,” Sanghvi said. “Investing is a very important life skill to have.”

Rhine Wang, a fourth-year business economics student who was a finalist in the competition, said she thinks stock pitch competitions allow students from different majors to learn financial and analytical skills that will help them in any industry.

“Regardless of what industry you are in, it is always crucial to learn how to understand and analyze markets, audiences and companies, and the competition helps in learning such skills,” Wang said.