Does Having an Investment Write-up Help in Applications?

I'm hoping this is the right place to post this, I also posted in the equity research forum but I'm not sure if that was correct. If not, I'll delete one of the posts, but anyway....

I am currently looking for a PE, IB, or ER job/internship coming out of a non-target undergraduate school in California (the odds are against me, I know). I have been receiving mentorship from a portfolio manager in LA, and he recommended that along with my resume and cover letter, I should have an investment write-up on a company I believe to be undervalued. My senior project was along those lines, but in the end it was overvalued instead of an attractive buy, and was tailored more towards corporate finance. My questions for this are as follows:

1) Is this worth my time to do this, and is it valuable towards being taken more seriously during the application process?
2) What size company should I be looking for? Is it better to do a large company with tons of public information to base my research off of, or is there a specific size I should be looking for?
3) I've heard mixed things about metrics I should look out for, what are some good examples of multiples and other metrics I should use?
4) Where should I start in general? Is there a site or resource you recommend for researching stocks and companies? For my senior project I had access to school databases, which is now no longer the case

Thanks for your time, any advice really does go a long way!

 

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I am convinced that having previously done a full (20 page+) analyst report on a company for one of my college courses helped immensely in landed my current role in ER. Interviewers both had it printed out and were asking a ton of questions on it, so make sure you know it well. I would say 110% do it if you want to go the ER route.

 
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I've attached a short 1-2 page pitch while cold emailing funds and that has gotten me some interviews so having a write up should help in normal applications as well. I would guess it would be easier to to look at small/mid cap companies instead of large ones (large ones should be fine too but with a large cap company you often run the risk of sending it to a person who might be covering the same sector/company who would be too knowledgeable about that company. For multiples, it depends on the company/sector, but usually looked at ones are p/e, ev/ebitda or ev/revenue, etc. For researching potential companies to pitch, just read some blogs or maybe look at what your favourite funds are doing and run a screener on capiq/bloomberg/some other online screener according to criteria you find appropriate and then sift through the companies you get until you find something interesting

 

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