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You'll never convince me this wasn't written by ChatGPT
Understandable hahah, but was written by me and 3 other friends. We spent around a month on it since we were also pitching it in a pitch competition at University, so that might explain a bit more.
Trying to be constructive here because you're a student and with more experience and refinement you'll get the admission at some point no problem. Some disjointed thoughts:
This is great for your finance class, but it misses the spirit of both VIC and an effective pitch in general. Your pitch is a book report, mostly just a list of facts and figures that don't affect the stock price. Just eyeballing different sentences, I see you're listing out the resume and 2005 career history of a VP of finance and that Sequoia owns 3.63%-- why do I need to know that? The terms "Beta" or "monte-carlo" should not be in your vocabulary, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if John stopped reading at that point. Boil your pitch down to 1) this is why the stock is mispriced, then 2) this is how the mispricing will be fixed. Everything else is filler (for example, the description of the business, which looks to be 90% of your report, is the least important part as it can easily be found in the 10k- make it no more than a paragraph or two of the most pertinent info). The valuation misses the mark- you're doing a DCF but I'm not sure you ever calculate future cash flows (and the components of those cash flows) or more importantly actually provide some logical basis for those cash flows. The worst case scenario is that growth is .4% lower than your base case? Did you just make that up? Keep working / reading / practicing, get a job in investing if that's what you want to do, then you should be able to get it.
Your feedback makes alot of sense, really appreciate you taking the time to list some things out. Will keep working and hopefully they will get much better with time.
Conclusion/summary first, and then all the supporting material behind it.
No one is going to have the patience to read your 30 page intro to reach the target price and variant perception part on page 31.
People are busy, you need to capture their attention early. It's not even clear whether this is a long or a short until half way down into the pitch, which as a PM is infuriating to read.
"The Cost of Revenue to Revenue ratio was 35.75%, compared to 29.56% in Q1 2023 and 25.32% in Q2 2022, indicating an increase in the Cost of Revenues. This could be due to inflation and transportation costs for exporting Temu’s orders overseas."
VIC Member here - I think this line disqualifies you in itself. "Could be" is nonsense, if you don't know why it went up or down, dig deeper or just on't mention it at all. Reads like a Wikipedia page and you do not name a single catalyst either.
Look at some of the pitches from Columbia's Value Investing newsletter or even try finding some older pitch in VIC that might've been used for initial application. This report isnt concise imo and kinda rambles on several unimportant things. I think you just need more practice writing pitches and you'll eventually get in, good luck!
The layout is making my eyes bleed. Order in paragraphs and/or bullets and cut out like 50% of the text.
Others have hit the high notes (no real discussion of a catalysts, where can they surprise and why) but you should consider creating outputs to go with the text. I prob don’t want to read about movements in the stock from 4 years ago but if you want to throw a price chart in there and highlight/BRIEFLY explain the moves then that’s more helpful. Seeing a comps table and quick model output is helpful too. A reader should be able to sense check the projections and your assumptions and maybe there’s something that let’s me do that buried in your text wall but a model output definitely would allow for that.
The MC sim is nonsense. I get what you’re trying to do but that’s not how stocks work and if you give me a 2 sigma interval of 40 to 260 then I’m so out. Yes, stock returns can have wide dispersions but think about what those outcomes imply and ask yourself if they’re worth including.
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