Hosted by the CFA Institute, the CFA Research Challenge provides the opportunity for top finance students from all over the world to demonstrate their know-how. Teams produce an investor report for a publically listed company (this year’s company: Indra), completing a comprehensive financial analysis, a 5-year forecast of financial statements and a final company valuation.
Final reports are submitted by February 15, 2018 and finalists then compete at the Madrid Stock Market on March 8, 2018. EADA has consistently been placed in the top three positions in the Madrid final during the last three year´s.
Meet EADA´s CFA Research Challenge Participants Ashiqur Rahman and Grecia Colmenares
Ashiqur Rahman has both American and Bangladeshi nationality. He has entrepreneurial experience in founding and growing a technology incubator in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and three years of experience in product management at Silicon Valley technology firms listed in NYSE. Ashiqur holds the CFA Level I and II and plans to complete the Level III in June of 2018.
Grecia Colmenares is from Mexico and has worked abroad in the United States and Spain. Grecia was motivated to join the programme at EADA to fulfil her long-term goal of starting her own business.
Ashiqur
This week has been characterised by increased productivity compared to prior weeks (minimum input – maximum output). Since this had been a very busy week for all of us, overwhelmed with presentations and assignments –not to mention a final examination– we managed to meet only once. This meeting was different from the previous ones, in which we had to get our hands dirty all over the internet to gather and analyse data. This time we had access to Thomson Reuters Eikon and we made the best use of it. We had all the relevant data in just a few clicks, and we got down to business right away.
Since we are nearing the end of the last trimester, our hands are full with many school commitments, but the coming week should be interesting, as well as we will look into the country and industry trends of Indra’s business to try to establish a correlation, hopefully using the new toy we now have at our fingertips – the Bloomberg terminal.
Grecia
The CFA Research Challenge has proven to be as its name says, very challenging. Since the start of the research and digging process, we realised that the investigation of Indra would take time and lots of reading!
Indra is a company worth billions of euros, it is present in several countries all around the world, and it has plenty of income sources; it has also a history of acquiring minor companies and has experienced ups and down in its market behaviour.
I know we will continue to encounter challenges, but this is where all the empirical experience comes from!
