EADA’s team for the CFA Research Challenge 2017 has been working hard to prepare for the kick off of the Challenge this month. Last year, EADA’s team took third place, and this year’s team is poised to take the lead. The team is made up of five participants from the International Master in Finance: Nathan Dolan (U.S.), Harish Papineni (India), Axel Hallinder (Sweden), Juliana Rosen (Brazil), and Natalia Barón (Colombia). For Axel Hallinder, a key aspect of the experience is the team´s diversity: “The Challenge puts you in a position in which you have to be productive and cooperate effectively with students from all over the world.”
The first CFA Research Challenge was held fifteen years ago in 2002, and today thousands of students from more than 900 universities and business schools around the globe participate. “I joined the CFA Research team because it represented an opportunity to gain industry experience, to implement the skills taught to me by EADA’s faculty, and to continue to ‘learn by doing’,” says team member Nathan Dolan.
Teams research and analyse a publicly traded company – this year’s company is Merlin Properties (IBEX-35), a leading real estate company specialised in the management of commercial assets in Spain and Portugal. “I joined the Challenge to have a real time exposure,” says Harish Papineni. “It is a great opportunity to not only enhance my learning experience in the Master, but to participate and prove myself and EADA on a world-class platform.”
Juliana Rosen highlights the importance of working effectively in a team: “Our group is very diverse in nationality and background, so everyone has something different to offer. We allow each member to play to his or her strengths, so that the team is always moving forward quickly.”
All of this year’s team members highly recommend the experience to future participants. “It’s a great learning experience,” confirms Natalia Barón. “You don’t just develop the hard skills for valuing a real life company, but also the soft skills to work with people from different cultures.”
Winners of the first round will present their findings at the finals in the Madrid Stock Market on March 23.