Category: Weekly Meetings

Owl Investment Group went on an exciting trip to New York one Friday morning of November to check out some of the interesting investment firms on Wall Street.

We visited J.W. Bristol, a small asset management firm on the street. Two of the managing directors Bob and Kevin generously hosted us. We had a four-and-a-half-hour long meeting discussing how Bristol allocates its asset and their investment strategies. It was a great fun! We also learned about their general customer base, what it takes to invest in a particular stock and general time horizons, etc. We were genuinely impressed by their integrated qualitative as well as quantitative approach to each stock. Their ability to dig deep into each of the stocks in terms of field studies, interviewing, relentless due dilligence inspired us a lot as new beginners who are still trying to play around our 100,000 funds.

Here are two funny pictures we had  at lunch. We dined at a nice little Japanese place.

Here is a fun picture:

See how cool we are are…wait, you are missing me here because I was the “invisible one” taking the hilarious picture. John isn’t in the picture because he was having a phone call with some investment bankers.

In the afternoon, we visited Morgan Stanley at 1 New York Plaza. We met with Ms. Leslie Knotts. She graduated about 10 years ago and had extensive work experience in UK, US and Hong Kong. She answered a lot of questions about how she got to MS and her experience abroad. It was exciting to see Bryn Mawr alumae like her who goes out into the world and blossom.

New York Trip one of OIG’s annual event. If you are interested, just join us and be our member.

There is certainly a lot of information today.

Ruilin introduced 2 buzz words: Sharpe Ratio and LTM. Both are very useful tools to analyze stocks and portfolio performance. Then we reviewed our portfolio (AT LAST!!) now that our password works again. Yufan sold China Education Alliance (CEU) in front of all of us. We are glad that today it made a 7% growth, that’s more than 1oo dollars recouped.

Then everyone got a piece of news cut off from the Wall Street Journal. We shouted out the words that we didn’t understand. Here is a list of them:

Arbitrage: the simultaneous buy and sale of an asset to profit through the inefficiency of the market. (Isn’t that neat?)

Alpha: One of the five useful tools in Modern Portfolio Theory. It basically compares the risk-adjusted performance of a portfolio with a benchmark index (e.g. LIBOR, MSCI, S& P 500, etc)

TIPS: Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. In other words, it’s used to protect your assets against the threat of inflation.

Quantitative Easing: OMC through FOMC–Check your intro to Macro book! Just remember that bond prices and interest rates are inversely related.

Gross Margin: Revenue net of Sold Goods. For comparison, please refer to Net Margin, Operating Margin, etc.

One last thing: reminder. For those of you that are joining us for the trip to New York, please show up at 6:45 am (I know it’s early) at Pem Arch. We will depart for Manhattan at that time.

Thanks to all of you who presented at OIG’s annual Club donation this week! Because our funding is limited, we could only grant our donations to those that we think are in more need of our support. If you didn’t get the funding this time, please don’t be discouraged. There will be another opportunity in the spring.

Here is a list of the club that we chose to fund this time:

Ping Pong Club   $400

Seven Sisters in China   $600

Bi-c0 Finance  $250

My Lab  $500

If you have any questions, please contact Sophia Abboud: sabboud@brynmawr.edu

We finally decided to sell  China Educational Alliance (CEU). This stock was bought around 6 months ago in the spring semester with the intention to diversify our portfolio in the BRIC countries. And its price has gone down ever since.

After a detailed background search, we found that there are just so much that we didn’t know about this company. First, it is not a Chinese company, which is quite contrary to its name and our previous thoughts. CEU originally grew out of a shell company established in North Caroline specializing in realty. Second, it’s revenue generators are suspicious. Investigation shows that it is actually a holding companies with at least 7 different business subbranches in industries as diverse as consulting, tutoring, online resources and vocational information. Their tutoring centers have received complaints of delayed employee payments. The educational game that they claimed to bring them the most revenue is dysfunctional and virtually unknown in China. Let alone that nothing in Chinese or English could be found about their consulting company. (For detailed information and a PowerPoint presentation, please contact lsun@brynmawr.edu)

The proceeds of this sale will amount to around $2,000, which we will use toward club donations next week.

This week at OIG we had a brief review of stock and investment basics. Some of the major points we covered are:

What is a stock

Equity financing

Common stock and preferred stock

Determinants of stock prices

Reading stock ticker

Market and industry

Useful tools in stock analysis and stock concepts

It might seem ambitious to absorb all of these in one meeting. I am sure many of you have heard of at least one of the terms which we talked about while there are also many other terms that still seem alien to you. Please drop Yufan or me an email if you need a copy of the PowerPoint that we used.

We also reviewed the performance of EROC, a stock we have been holding for a while. Some of the board members proposed to sell it since we have already met our target profit of 35%. However, some of you argued that energy stock prices general rise during the winter when the demand is high for oil. We reviewed the past trend and it seemed to be the case. At the end, we decided to stick to EROC until after January to see how it goes.

Whole Foods, the stock that we bought last week, has been down a little. However, we are not too worried about that because it is a value stock that we want to hold on to for a longer period of time. Sasha proposed in a recent board meeting that we should set some rules to allocate our investments to different industries. Right now we only set target goals for some of the stocks we pick, like EROC. Please share with us your thoughts on this in the next meeting.

Also, welcome back from Fall Break! Hope you all enjoyed a great vacation and are ready for OIG again! If you have not yet signed up for the New York Trip, please drop a message to Sasha. The seats are extremely limited. We will be visiting Morgan Stanley and J.W. Bristol this time on November 5^th, Friday.

Questions? Leave me a comment.:)

Dear all,

Our meeting this week was awesome! ! We covered a lot and got a lot done. Great job, ladies!

We mainly put forward the question of Google v. Whole Foods, the two stocks picked by our two raffle winners last week. Yufan gave a wonderful recap on how the two stocks were doing. Then we discussed the pros and cons of the two choices in order to buy the appropriate number of shares from one of them.

Google:

Pros:

• Go-Google
• Well-established
• Andriod

Cons:

• High price, not much room left for price boom
• Already too much IT in our portfolio

Whole Foods

Pros:

• It’s food!! Basic need of people
• Cheap price
• Great company to work for, vault and Forbes reported
• High potential of growth, good for long term
• Hints of expansion: Next Starbucks?

Cons:

• Not sure if it is recession-proof because it is so high-end
• Mid-term elections pending, volatility concerns

Finally, after a blind vote, we choose to buy 50 shares of Whole Foods. *High Fives* Special thanks to Lilly, Evelyn, Tong and others who have contributed!!

It will contribute to the diversification of our stocks and we are optimistic about its future growth.

Sasha also announced that we will be having a NY trip on November 5th. We will be visiting J.W. Bristol and Morgan Stanley, great places to go if you are into finance. Since the seats are extremely limited, please look out for our emails and RSVP as soon as possible.

Questions? Leave a comment!

We had our first meeting after Fall Frolic at Taylor Hall this Wednesday. Thanks to all of you who showed up and we really appreciate your wonderful contributions!! This meeting was more of an introduction of who we are and it showed you how we will operate in the future.

We had everyone introduce themselves. We also talked briefly about how OIG started and what we have been doing since 1976. This year’s board members include Sasha Bereznak (President, 11’), Yufan Wang (Portfolio Manager 11’), Ruilin Xu (Treasurer 11’), Sophia Abboud (Publicity Chair 12’) and Lingyi Sun (Secretary 12’). Sasha drew out two tickets for our raffle. This year’s raffle stocks are Whole Foods and Google. Nice choices!!

Later on, Yufan gave an excellent presentation of the newsletter that she made. It looked so professional and polished!! She briefly reviewed our portfolio. Some of you made great suggestions about probing the possibilities of buying natural resources stocks or mutual funds. We will look into them in more details in our future meetings.

A brief blog tour was given by Lingyi. Ruilin then started to talk about our word of the week: Beta. It is an indicator that compares the growth (decline) of the stock against the market. In the future, Ruilin will be talking about the word of the week at the beginning of each meeting. We hope to generate a list of the buzz words for all of you by the end of the semester. Hopefully these will all come in handy.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us, please feel free to leave a comment!!

This Wednesday (September 16^th), OIG hosted its first meeting of the semester as well as its annual summer panel event.

Lilly Amirhekmat (11’, Goldman Sachs), Tong Wu (12’, Abacus), April Stewart (11’, CIT) and Stephanie Ezeoba (11’, BNY Mellon) shared with the audience their internship experience in finance this summer. They each answered questions such as how they found the internships, and what they’ve learned from the process.

Dear Ladies,

Welcome back on campus! We hope you all enjoyed a wonderful and fruitful summer. The exciting news is that OIG will start it’s meeting soon as well. We will have our regular meetings this semester on Wednesdays, 9:00pm-10:00pm at Taylor F (for those of you who hasn’t quite  familiarize yourself with the campus geography yet, it’s the cozy room with a gigantic and classy wooden door on the second floor of Taylor Hall).

Although the Fall Frolic doesn’t start until September 16th (please check us out and sign up on site!!),  our first meeting of this semester will take place on September 15th, Wednesday, 9:00pm-10:00pm at Taylor F. It will be our annual tradition: Summer Panel. We will invite a group of brilliant fellow Mawrters who have done exciting jobs or internships during the summer to share with us how they got there and what they’ve learned throughout the process. Everyone is welcome to this event.

Also, this year we have a stellar new team of board members who will be contributing to OIG alongside with you.

President: Sarah Bereznak 11′

Portfolio Manager: Yufan Wang 11′

Treasurer: Ruilin Xu 11′

Publicity Chair: Sophia Abbound 12′

Secretary: Lingyi Sun 12′

Questions?? Feel free to leave a comment.

So much for the welcome introduction. Hope to see you at OIG’s first event in two weeks and we hope you have a wonderful new semester!