CMCnotes

UW alumni from Robert W. Baird & Co. and Northwestern Mutual Capital will be on campus to discuss their industry, firms, and active employment opportunities. The event will be held in 2120 Grainger on Thursday, September 5th from 6:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. followed by a social gathering at the Nitty Gritty.

Robert W. Baird & Co. is an employee-owned and privately held investment company headquartered in Milwaukee with over $181 billion in client assets. The speakers will describe their firm and job opportunities in equity capital markets including investment banking, equity research, and institutional sales and trading.

• Kevin Condon, Equity Research Analyst
• Michael Pesendorfer, Research Analyst

Northwestern Mutual Capital manages more than $6 billion in direct private debt and private equity capital and is an active investor in leveraged buyout, growth equity, and infrastructure transactions. The team consists of over 30 investment professionals with headquarters in Milwaukee.

• Mike Peterson, Principal

If you would like to RSVP in advance, please email Cara Scadden at cara.scadden@wisc.edu. However, please note that this is an open event and you are welcome to attend without an RSVP.

Passing along a prvate equity investment associate opportunity with the Stephens Group for Summer 2020. The Stephens Group (“SG”) is a private equity firm based in Little Rock, AR targeting investments in industries across the U.S., including industrial and commercial products and services, specialty distribution, B2B food and beverage, consumer products, and technology infrastructure and tech-enabled services. SG is backed by the resources of the Stephens Family. SG targets deploying $150 - $200 million of equity capital each year, which equates to a fund of $800 million to $1 billion.

Enterprising Investor, a CFA Institute publication had a nice summary of James Valetine’s CFA Institute 2017 Conference presentation: Equity Research and Valuation. Valentine is a former transportation analyst with Morgan Stanley who now runs AnalystSolutions, an equity analyst evaluation and training firm. He is also the author of Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts, an excellent how-to book for aspiring analysts. We assign numerous readings from the book in the Applied Equity Markets Research (AEMR) class and highly recommend it. The author describes Valentine’s 11 rules of thumb when determining equity valuations and setting price targets.

In an earlier post (Investment Philosophy Matters When Generating Ideas) we highlighted that growth and value investors typically look at different things when identifying new ideas. Growth investors tend to focus on growth in sales and earnings, while value investors focus on price relative to something that proxies for the value of the company like assets, earnings, or cash flows. Professional investors generate ideas in many ways, but one common approach is to use screens that filter a large universe of stocks for the ones with characteristics the investors think likely to yield attractive investments - consistent with their philosophy. Factset has a powerful screening tool you can use to identify your own ideas.

CMC alumnus Jessica Chen wants you to know Goldman Sachs 2020 summer analyst application is now open. The attached documents describe the opportunities and outline the recruiting process with links to Goldman's career site. Goldman reviews applications on a rolling basis - so apply as soon as you are ready to begin the interview process.

Good luck!