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[Keith Harvey, professor of finance]: This is a really fun class to teach. Initially we have to decide how we’re going to allocate our portfolios, just meaning, how much weight to put in various sectors of the economy or geographically across the world. So the students then do some research to estimate expected returns and risk in various asset classes in various geographies.
We assign each student to an industry, to a location in the world geographically, and they do that analysis then they come together with that work and they decide how to allocate the portfolio. So they can take that work and they can put that into what we call their student e-portfolio, all the research that they’ve done while they’re in class, and then present that to an employer to say hey here are some stocks they actually valued, here’s what happened after we bought them, here’s how we made decisions either and thus more or to divest from those companies and really show employers some real-world application of what they did while they were in school.
All of this work is being done in conjunction with using the Bloomberg terminals. Bloomberg terminals are used extensively of course in practice, so students are getting a hands-on experience with a tool they’ll use out in the world and employers find that experience very attractive.
[Harry White, professor of finance]: Part of the process here is a student’s experiment with different investment strategies. We’ve gone through cycles and the markets. The students have had to deal with two major down cycles, the 2000-2001 down cycle in the markets and then of course the 2007 through 2009 down cycle in the markets, and the students were able to try different strategies to try to figure out how to manage money under those rather trying to market conditions, which is a great learning experience for them and was.
They came up with some pretty interesting strategies over the years. Some of them have worked very well others not so well and it doesn’t really matter which way it goes, it’s always a learning experience for the students which is what we’re trying to accomplish here.
[Tim Schlindwein, founding donor of the student-managed investment fund]: Well I think it’s a good question as to why somebody from a long way away perhaps came to Boise to contribute to a program. It probably reflects a couple of things. Number one, my own experience. I never went through an investment program as a student many years ago, but one of my best hires a long time ago was somebody who had gone through a student investment program and I saw the clear benefit of that, and I developed an interest through people I’ve gotten to know here at Boise State.
There was an interest in developing a program here. I think there had been an initial starter one and it kind of just hit at the right time and I thought this is a good thing to get involved with.
[Thomas Lindblom, student majoring in economics and finance]: I think that this class has been a great opportunity for me to apply what I’ve learned in other classes to kind of take the theoretical knowledge and put it in the real world, and I think that being able to see the macroeconomic level, the news that’s going on day to day, and being able to apply that has been a wonderful learning experience in this class. I think that by taking this class I’ve gained skills and tools that I’ll be able to utilize throughout my career and investment and I will be able to take these with me to improve both myself and my clients futures.
[Keith Harvey]: One of things I really like about teaching the class is that live application. The students really enjoy the fact that every week, every class period, there’s new information coming into the market so we’re following the news, we’re following the data and there’s always an opportunity then to have a discussion about what’s happening right now in the markets and the students very much enjoy that application as do I. It just makes the class so much fun to teach because it’s always interactive, it’s very active learning, they’re passively receiving material, you know again they’re always applying it to these real world portfolios.
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[Garrett McBrayer, assistant professor of finance]: What we are trying to do here is to teach our students to view investing through a broader lens than financial returns, to view their investments as something that’s actually impacting their local environment, their regional environment, their national environment, ultimately the world right. Investing is a form of activism where your money is your vote, right? And so as our students go forward and if they’re voting increasingly with their investments, increasingly with their money for social returns, that’s going to affect the way markets work.
And so what we have now is a unique opportunity to teach students these skills in a very controlled environment where they’re encouraged to take risks, they’re encouraged to take their own initiatives in order to seek out investments that are maybe more in-line with their social desires or their environmental desires or their governance desires. Whatever it is that this group of students deem as the way they define impact investing, they are able to do that here with the supervision and help of the faculty at Boise State and the College of Business here at Boise State.
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