Author: Yiran Zhang

Time flies so fast! It is already OIG’s last meeting. We held one of OIG’s biggest events of the year: the Senior Job Panel. This year, OIG was able to co-sponsor the Senior Job Panel with 85 Broads Bryn Mawr Chapter, Bi-Co Finance Club and Consulting Club.

Seniors from both Haverford and Bryn Mawr, who will be pursuing careers in the Financial Industry after graduation, gathered at Taylor G and gave excellent talks. The Panel was followed by a great networking event.

Many students came to the event to learn from our panelists’ experiences. The following are some of the advice given by the panelists as they shared their experiences of interviews for interviews and jobs:

1. Remember that people like to talk about themselves and let them talk during networking and interviews.

2. Always say something positive because networking is like dating and nobody wants to spend the entire date listening to your complaints.

3. It’s very important to find the right fit. You should know what types of situations you are facing and what types of people you are talking to. You should prepare respond differently to different situations.

4. Never dominate the conversation. This will make others feel uncomfortable.

5. Show your interests to the interviewers and always smile while speaking and listening.

6. Even though interviews are competitions, it’s more important to enjoy them and make them a learning experience. It’s also important to learn more about yourself during the process.

7. Be genuine and friendly during interviews.

8. Always take a pen and notebook during internship. For every second in the internship, you are learning something new about the finance industry. Every second counts.

9.  Do as much as research about the project you are assigned to. Be prepared for the possible challenges you can think of. Although you are not familiar with the subject, be as prepared as you can be.

10. Don’t ask about something directly. There are arts of asking questions. Instead, tell them what you’ve already known and show them where you got stuck.  Don’t just throw the questions at people and never ask questions that can be found easily online.

11. Make an effort to get to know about a company’s own resources during an internship and get to know people in your team and in the company and listen to their experiences in different positions. Reach out to the HR department for contacts info if you want to know more people.

12. If you don’t know something, never ever make it up, just admit that you don’t know. People in the industry will tell whether you know it or not immediately.

13. Always remember to send the thank-you note, and include the answer to the question if you got stuck during the interview. Interviewers will appreciate your efforts of looking for the answers.

14. During the interview, take the direction that interviewer leads you to, follow their instructions.

15. One panelist offered his four secrets during interview: be succinct, insightful and confident and use body movement.

16. One question that Bi-Co students are always asked is why Bryn Mawr/Haverford? It’s never bad to answer it with talking about the link with the school size compared to that of the company.

17. It’s a cliché but yes, technique questions and brain teasers come all the time.

18. Be confident but don’t pretend you know everything.

19. For the case analysis, don’t be afraid if you go beyond the questions they ask. It’s always good to offer them your unique ways of problem solving.

20. Know your audiences and be prepared for different kinds of questions.

This will be my last blog for OIG club as the Secretary of Year 2011-2012.I am really grateful for those a few people who read my blog and gave comments. OIG is looking forward to having another fantastic year with old and new friends.

OIG 4.11

Thank you all for coming. Today’s meeting will be the last time we review our portfolio and make sure that the portfolio will be in good shape before summer kicks off.

Alisha brought several market updates. The Federal Reserve upgraded its view of the economy. It is anticipated that the  Federal Reserve would walk ways form the stimulus policies. Interest rate is still low and will be staying low for a couple of years. Market confidence for European rises. Fed Reserve’s stimulus plans will expire in June. However, there are still uncertainties about the market. Another important market update is about China’s changing attitude towards America. China used to desire to imitate the American capitalism system. However, due to the long-term financial crisis, Chinese government slowed down in purchasing American Treasury Bonds. On Wall Street, the stock market ended its five-day skid and started to recover.

Linyi then gave several suggestions for the portfolio. She suggested that we pay close attention to stocks which have great potentials to grow. Also, she suggested that OIG pay more attention to more stable stocks such as Citi, JP Morgan, Bank of American and Wells Fargo. All these banks have diversified categories of investment. Another important thing to do with our portfolio is to identify stocks that are not doing so well and minimize the loss we might have, such as AT&T and Vodafone(VOD). Some fields that Lingyi suggested we look at to invest in include energy utility companies and real estate. Energy utility companies always carry goof dividends, which will help cushion some of our losses. There are clear signs of recovery in the real estate market. Prices for apartment and real estate commercial lending are picking up.

Wanda did a presentation for “Word of The Week”. Alpha is a measure of performance on a risk-adjusted basis. Alpha takes the volatility of a mutual fund and compares its risk-adjusted performance to a benchmark index. High level of alpha will result in great profit when marketing is doing well and greater losses when market starts to decline.

Next week, we will have our ‘Senior Job Panel’.

Dear all,

Thanks all for coming to this week’s meeting. We had our exciting and competitive election for the OIG Exec Board next year.  Members of OIG came and listened to the candidates’ speech and had thorough discussions about each candidate. Three of our board members will be graduating at the end of semester and we are welcoming 4 new board members.  Thank you all for the support and effort put in our club and we would want to see you all coming again  next year.

Our new board members are as follows:

President : Andrea Parra(13)

Portfolio manager: Alisha Pradhan(13)

Bank Treasurer:Wendy Huang(13)

Publicity: Dingwei Li(15)

Secretary: Nkiruka Anizoba (14)

 

 

Welcome to our OIG meeting this week!

We talked about Short vs. Long trading. Several members asked about short selling throughout the semester and we decided to do a tutorial to help everyone understand it better.

Firstly, long selling, is basically what we are doing with our portfolio. In long selling, one purchases the stock and holds it for a long time expecting its value to increase. On the other hand, short selling means the selling of a stock that the seller doesn’t own. More specifically, a short sale is the sale of a security that isn’t owned by the seller, but that is promised to be delivered. In another words, when you short sell a stock, you borrow stocks from your broker and you sell the shares sooner or later, you need to buy back the same number of shares and return them to your broker. If the price drops, you make a profit on the difference. If the price of the stock rises, you have to buy it back at the higher price, and you lose money.

Short selling, is the opposite of long selling. Investors want a decrease in value of the stock and want the company to perform poorly so you can profit from the difference in prices at the same time.

The two main reasons people decide to short sales are to speculate or to hedge.

Because the nature of short selling is against the market, SEC has been trying to establish more rules to regulate this sector of financial market. For example, SEC has more specific requirements and standards for setting up a margin account which is an essential step in the short sell transaction.

There are different reasons for investors to choose long term investment or short selling. Long term has fewer risks compared to short sell.

Compared to risks of economy and the risk of inflations of long term investment, the frequent transaction involved might help investors gain some purchase power. At the same time the downside could be severe for short sell. Since it’s short sell, one cannot stay in the short sell state for a long period and the general trend of market is growth which will be a disaster for short seller. The loss can be infinite as the stocks do better while the profit is limited plus heavy transaction fees and insurance leverage. Short squeeze can wring the profit out of your investment. When you take everything into account, you could do the right thing at the wrong time, such as the dot.com bubble in early 2000. There are also limits on the types of funds that can process short sale.

Last but not least is the ethical problem. It’s safe to say that short sellers are not popular people on Wall Street because they make money in bear market. Although there are illegal practices of “short and distort” involved in short sell, we should remember the contributions of short selling to the general financial market. Short selling helps increase liquidity and unbiased observations of companies as well as working at the front line of finding financial fraud in companies.

If you would like to know more about definition of short vs long and how they differ, you can visit Investpedia.com to learn more.

Don’t forget that we will have our election next week. Come and support and be part of OIG next year. Everyone’s vote counts.

Welcome! Today is the 29^th of February of 2012. A very special Wednesday as it is our last meeting before break.

Following last week’s club function, we had another group called “She Is The First”. The founder worked at 17 fashion magazine. “She Is The First” is an organization that provides support to first generation students going to college. The group is planning to have a fund raising event at Thomas Great Hall. The group will seek help from The Graduate School of Social Work to help make this event happen. They will try to use the funds raised to cover the travel and food at event and they will also try to invite the founder to the event and they will be responsible for the Amtrak, night-time event. They already received $600 from SGA, but they will need $1000 in total so they need an additional $400. The group is also contacting the  Dean’s Office and Graduate School of Social Work to get support for this event. The presenter from the group is to cover food expenses, and she will try to find a restaurant that offers a reasonable price with  prior experience at Bryn Mawr. They plan n using the food as an incentive to make people attend the event.

This week, we will introduce a new way to present the “Word of The Week”, by including the word in the article. This week, we talked about EV/sale. Low EV/sale is more attractive. When the ratio increases, it means there is more demand for goods.

Evelyn did a presentation about Apple Inc. Today’s price was 542.44. We looked at a graph showing change in the past 52 weeks. Our portfolio displaced a broadened gap between our good-performance stocks Apple and bad-performance stocks, Exxon Mobil. We figured, with the coming release of the Ipad 3 on the March 7^th, the performance of our Apple stocks will be steady and strong. The new iPad will have an improved camera and 10 hour battery life. High growth of Apple has a 19% global cellphone and is expecting expand in global arena. Apple also accumulated lots of cash and we are expecting the price to reach 600 soon and 700 at the end of the year. There is plenty room for growth .

Lingyi also did a market recap.

As usual, we have OIG’s tradition: Club donation.

The first club is MUN. Same as last smester, they are planning t go to this semester’s MUN conference in New York. They are asking OIG for 200 dollars to cover their accommodation costs in New York. This two-day event will be held at New York city and they are trying to minimize the cost for each member to include as many members as possible. They already have 400 dollars from SGA and they are asking 200 dollars from OIG to make up the rest of cost. The total cost for accommodation is 600 dollars.

MUN club decided to cover the transportation costs, which is MegaBus with funding from SGA, and cover the delegation fees per person.

Next we have two clubs asking for funding to sponsor two on-campus performances. One is Pulso Latino. They are asking for funding for their annual culture show. They are planning to host a culture show in the Goodhart theatre. They will also order catering for special Latino food. They already have funding from SGA to cover the most cost of culture show. This additional funding that they are requesting will enable them to have better food at the show and attract more students to the show.

Another group asking for funding is Mujeres. Their club budget is tight because they missed the chance to get funding from SGA. This is a Latino affinity group. They are planning to have a dance workshop and a showcase. They are trying to get as much funding as possible as this is their biggest event this year.

Members had a discussion about the amount of funding for each club and studied their respective budget worksheets to figure out the actual amount needed.

Welcome to OIG’s  second meeting.

We had our first tutorial about a new approach to the new stock. We gave a shot introduction about fundamental and technical analysis. All the board members will give you a brief introduction on some perspectives in these two analysis methods. Our primary sources of this a wonderful website that is good for beginning investors as well as beginning learners in financial market.

Fundamental Analysis, also called the traditional qualitative analysis, is a method of evaluating a security that entails attempting to measure its intrinsic value by examining related economic, financial and other qualitative and quantitative factors. Fundamental analysts attempt to study everything that can affect the security’s value, including macroeconomic factors (like the overall economy and industry conditions) and company-specific factors (like financial condition and management).

On the other hand, technical analysis is considered as a quantitative analysis. It is a method of evaluating securities by analyzing statistics generated by market activity, such as past prices and volume. Technical analysts do not attempt to measure a security’s intrinsic value, but instead use charts and other tools to identify patterns that can suggest future activity.

We also talked about some important measurements of the stock such as PE, EPS vlue and analysis about the general performance stock over time. For more knowledge about these two methods, you can go the website of Investpedia to watch many examples and videos to explain the difference by simple demonstrations.

Even though there are many indicators in both analysis methods. There is nothing that will tell you the exact stock to buy or the  future performance of the stock as there are so many variables in the stock market.

 

Welcome back! Thanks for coming to this semester’s OIG. As usual we will meet on Wednesday night at Taylor G. This semester, we will have more interesting events and learning experiences for all the members.

Throughout the semester, OIG will continue promoting more awareness on campus and please let is know if you have any ideas as to how to make OIG better known throughout campus. During this semester, we will continue to have workshops to teach members more about financial markets and tools to evaluate the values of stocks and help members to develop their own choices of portfolios. Also, we will encourage members to do presentations about their choices of stock and do evaluations about their choices and suggestions will be considered by all the members. It’s your chance to make your contributions to the club and make a difference in our portfolio with OIG’s real money.

During the semester, we will also have our club donations and NYC trip. We will be visiting different firms this semester and please submit your top choices of firms that you will like to visit and OIG will work towards making it happen.

In summary, welcome back. We are looking forward to a new semester with you and helping to prepare you for possible future plans in any of the financial fields.

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.