Month: January 2012

Sasha, our previous president came back to visit during our 11.9 meeting. Welcome back, Sasha!

Sasha talked about her experience in Bryn Mawr. She was a Math major and was involved in OIG for all of her four years at Bryn Mawr. She talked about her internship experience in her sophomore year. It was an internship at the Law department of ACT.  She worked as a credit analyst and sorted all the finance related news. As an intern, she also worked on projects with other interns and this helped all the interns get to know each other.

Sasha mentioned wishing that she had started making use of the CDO resources earlier. She also mentioned the importance of maintaining connections with alumnae and other contacts in companies you may wish to intern or work for.

Sasha has been working for Vanguard since her graduation from Bryn Mawr. She is now in her first-year rotation process. This year’s work mainly is aim to establish group work ethics, to think critically, to communicate with people and to be familiar with each department.

So far, her daily responsibilities include taking phone calls and answering clients’ questions. This routine job helps her know the products of Vanguard and get to know the company better.

Sasha then talks more about Vanguard. It is a mutual fund company. Vanguard also helps its clients process 401K forms, retirement plans and  provides other financial services. She also mentioned some other famous mutual funds companies, such as Fidelity. Vanguard always keeps its expense lowest in the industry. Vanguard is conservative, but it has been devoted to recruit more female workers. In fact, we have a lot of Bryn Mawr alumnae working at Vanguard right now.

Sasha advices those want to have a job in finance industry to start their preparations early. To start talk to different people in finance and research online, and be prepared for behavioral interview questions, be able to elaborate on your resume and be updated about current events.

Another member asked about her experience in Bryn Mawr and how to have a wonderful resume during four years in Bryn Mawr. She didn’t give specific guidelines. Generally, sports are great. Any working experience, including working in dining can be transfer skills to be elaborated on resume. All the working experiences can help you learn to be delegate, and learn to talk to different people and become a good team worker. Sasha used her experience as an Ann Taylor salesperson to express her point. This job helped her to learn to get people buy Ann Taylor products and being friendly. Basically, any experiences can help in some ways and ore relevant experience gradually would be better. She mentioned that Vanguard took voluntary work into consideration. She talked about advantages of a Liberal Arts education as well. She also reminded us of the importance of our Honor Code. Ethical people are always valued in this industry. Overall, the most important thing is to be familiar with skills you learned and be confident so as to be able sell yourself during an interview.

 

Dear all,

Thank you so much for coming to our OIG meeting. OIG is thinking about inviting a professional to have a workshop on resumes. This workshop will focus on resumes for positions in financial firms. We plan to hold a workshop during the week and we will invite Bryn Mawr alumna June Lee who is currently working in Morgan Stanley. We will have lunch together on November 23rd, 2011. We will ask her some questions to get more insights about the working environment in Morgan Stanley and some general information about interviews and internships. We will also be having our winter party and there will be tons of wonderful food. Please come and join us for the celebration at the end of the semester.

Wanda did a presentation about the stock of General Electric. GE provides various services to different industries. It’s one of the early companies, called bluest of blue chip. The latest earning call showed steady growth especially in the energy sector. GE is considered as undervalued compared to its peers. Volatility of GE flows with market. GE has the highest Beta (a number describing the relation of its returns with those of the financial market as a whole) compare to its competitors. It was held by 46 hedge funds compared to MMM(29) and CSL(15), TYC(48).

GE just renewed its contracts to service two nuclear power plants in Spain. It’s a long-time safe stock.

The stock we bought last week Schlumberger ended 72.74. It looks like the stock is doing good.

We decided to do wait to a later date about GE. Also, we want more members to look into more stocks in emerging countries.

Dear all,

Lingyi started off the meeting by talking about our portfolio. We will make the decision about some stock purchase in subsequent meetings. We will look more into safe stock, which generates cash but doesn’t have much growth potential. Our portfolio is really heavy in technology and industrial stocks.  Later we will might think about shifting our focus more to conservative side of the investment.

We had a brief but condensed market update session. Several of the updates caught our attention. First, the situation in Greece and Italy has improved. Second, the home sales were up 6% compared to last month. Third, stock market performed better than expected this week. Fourth, European crisis seems to be under control.

Lingyi went over our portfolio. Due to the better performance of the whole market, our portfolio did out-performing market this week. In order to find a better source of growth, we looked at the some possible change in our portfolio. Our portfolio has a high percentage of high-tech stocks. They may be volatile during market panic. Therefore, we need to start to look at utilities stock that will help us sustain in bad times.

Firstly, we looked at LMT (Lockheed Martin Corporation). It is an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company with worldwide interests. Its biggest customer is NASA. Every year, LMT gets many orders from NASA. However, due to recent cut in the US’ military budget. LMT might be affected by the major government policies changes. We decided to look at Lockheed Martin again when it goes down.

Secondly, Alia did a presentation about Schlumberger Limited. It is world’s largest oilfield services company. Today Schlumberger supplies the petroleum industry with services such as seismic acquisition and processing, formation evaluation, well testing and directional drilling, well cementing and stimulation, artificial lift, well completions and consulting, and software and information management. The company is also involved in the groundwater extraction and carbon capture and storage industries. It’s a cyclic stock. It covers many diverse field related to Oil Industry and provides services in 80 different countries. We think it will be a good choice in terms of long term performance.

We made the decision to buy Schlumberger. We voted to decide number of shares to be 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 or 100 shares. We ultimately decided to make purchase of 30 shares of Schlumberger. The expected growth is upside 75 and downside 60 dollars. We will talk be sorting out the problem of no one taking care of the portfolio during the summer shortly.