Greetings Capital Management Club (CMC) alumnus. Below is the inaugural edition of what we hope will be a biannual newsletter highlighting club activities.Our objective is to better connect with alumni and other investment professionals to build an alumni network that can help our members as they pursue investing careers. 

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.