2016 CHICAGO QUANTITATIVE ALLIANCE INVESTMENT CHALLENGE: U OF A CQA TEAM - INVESTMENT STRATEGY

Abstract

For my finance, honors thesis I participated in the 4th annual CQA Investment Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to successfully manage an equity long-short, market neutral portfolio (hedge fund). I worked on a team with three other guys from the Applied Portfolio Management class to invest and manage $20,000,000 of hypothetical money. Our investment horizon ran from October 30, 2015 – April 1, 2016. The stock universe we had access to was the Russell 1000, which mainly consists of the highest-ranking large cap stocks in the US equity market. Thirty-one teams from different universities were judged at the end of the competition on absolute return rank, adjusted return rank (the Sharpe ratio) and evaluation of the team video, which discussed investment strategy. The University of Arizona team achieved an absolute return of 6.47%, Sharpe ratio of 0.36 and abnormal return (alpha) of 20.05%. We finished with a ranking of 7th place out of 31 participating schools.