Hedge Fund Global Winners

Co-hosted by Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the Southeastern Alternative Funds Association, this international competition tasks students, from undergraduate to Ph.D. levels, with applying theory to practice by developing creative and effective hedge fund investment strategy proposals.

The winning Bauer student team included BBAs Chloe Enard, Kushaagra Sood, Ben Sassi and Shiva Venugopal with MS Finance candidate Zac Yoakam, who described the experience as an exercise in patience, teamwork and problem solving.

In the first round, 41 teams from 33 different colleges and universities submitted proposals to a panel of 40 hedge fund and investment industry professionals to review. The judges selected the top five proposals to move on to the second round to present their strategies to top industry executives.

Within 48 hours of the deadline to submit their proposals, the Bauer team faced a hard truth: their original idea would not produce the results needed to qualify for the final round.

“The competition required a certain amount of volume trading, and what we came up with would not work in the amount of time we had,” Yoakam said. “If we submitted what we had, we would have been disqualified right away.”

With no other choice but to adjust last minute, the rest of the team put their trust in Sassi, who took the lead in developing a new proposal before time ran out, Yoakam added.

Their winning proposal, “Phantom Vega: Decomposing the Earnings Variance Risk Premium,” took less of a theoretical approach and applied stock data to generate revenue.

“Something we found in our research was a big information gap between theory and practice,” Sood said. “Even traders in the industry, while they might know this information, haven’t acted on it. We’re trying to connect those two sides, and that’s something we really tried to outline in our proposal. We think we have something that can add value.”

Another standout competition decision? The team communicated with the judges as peers during their presentation, rather than positioning themselves as students, Enard said.

“They’re hedge fund professionals. They deal with alternative investments all day,” she said. “We didn’t start off by explaining what these mechanisms are. What we did was tell a story.”

They were proud to represent Bauer and UH as finalists and ultimately as winners, Enard added. It was surreal to place first against fierce competition from other nationally ranked business schools who all brought strong investment strategies of their own, she said.

"If you do the work, you’ll be rewarded,” Sassi said. “That’s the biggest lesson I took away from this.”