Students Investment Club
Hello. I am a sophomore, studying Mathematical Finance, and Economics and Finance at Catawba college. Currently me and my friends are working on a plan to establishing an investment fund for our college. The idea behind the fund is to provide real investing and management experience to our students and valuable networking with the industry representatives. I would gladly accept any support, information or ideas! Thank you very much!
Reach out to alumni for funds or try to do some type of partnership with your school's endowment
Thank you for your reply! I would certainly do that. However, I would like to get more information about legal part of an organization of such fund, does anyone know something? Are there any people who have done it already and could share their experience? Thank you
I would reach out to a professor at the school that you are close to. I partook in student run fund in undergrad and thought it was extremely valuable, but it had already been set up prior to me going to the school. I would google around for schools that have such funds and explore their websites. For us, we needed to come up with an investment policy statement, which the fund already had but it was more just getting familiar with how the fund would work if we set up our own. The money could be a problem, but you could at least organize a competition where the best ideas would be able to present to the board an investment idea and perhaps the board would hold a vote and agree to make a small investment out of the existing endowment in the best ideas.
Hi ! I am currently the president of my school´s finance society. Ask your school administration to help you with the paper, it has to be done seriously. When will your club be launched ?
We will organize a tarding contest in September, let me know when you will lauch yours.
Sylvain
Hey,
I'm actually working on a similar project.
We are classified as an informational organization with a goal of teaching students about careers in the investing and trading, but we have been working to raise capital for a fund. My experience (for what it's worth) is that alumni have been somewhat reluctant to give money to student organizations directly, but one of my school's finance organizations was able to obtain about $250k from our endowment. They are slightly limited in that they can only do long only, value based, equity investments and are limited to pitching buys.
My organization goes slightly further into other asset classes and were looking to raise money from other sources. We have had some success reaching out to banks and investment managers for smaller amounts in greater numbers. Additionally, we've increased our marketing efforts to become more visible.
If you could share a little more information on your capital goals and product types, I'd be happy to share some of our strategies that have worked.
As far as I know there are three ways to establish the student managed fund: 1) acquire capital from the schools endowment; 2) Raise capital from alumni or other beneficiaries; 3) Or start and organization working as an actual hedge fund with the capital rised before. The way I see it for our college is to have a fund with rised capital from endowment or other sources like number two. For this moment i had a conversation with a chair of econ and finance department and the agreement is that we(Students) will make a thorough "business plan" present it to faculty and then to the school authorities and provost and if they will like it then the search for funds will start. The idea is to have a student managed portfolio with combination of stocks and some bonds exposure. Briefly, students would be divided into particular management groups responsible for particular industry or product, doing research and evaluation and then presenting to the advisory board consisting of faculty members and industry people for approval. This is just one of the main ideas. Another important factor is to attract people from the industry who would be willing to join advisory board.
We basically did the same thing. The idea of making a firm operating as a hedge fund really isn't feasible to do legally (from our research), so we dismissed that idea. School money is probably going to come with contingencies, but if you're looking for equities and FI, you might be ok with that.
For us, the only real option was firm money, and the way that we had success was pitching it as a recruiting opportunity to better candidates coming from a school that they already liked. You also have to be talking with people who are MD or higher. If you ask for $100K, they will just laugh at you, but if you ask for smaller amounts from more firms, you will likely have some positive responses.
I used to run this. PM me any specific questions you might have, happy to help.
http://www.gtsf.gatech.edu/get-involved/join-committee/investment-commi…
I tried to send u PM message, however it says I don't have enough bananas.
Maybe you should try and get more bananas
Definitely find alumni or talk with the endowment organizers. That's how a lot of student investment funds get started. There is actually a new book that came out called "Trading and Money Management in a Student Managed Portfolio." Jason Greene (the author) helped the students in the organization of the Saluki Student Investment Fund. This book goes through the process of setting up and managing a student run investment fund. I think it would help you out a lot or at least give structure to your ideas. Good Luck!
Thank you! I'm already reading this book!
That's great! :)
Focus on reaching out to your endowment guys, put together a strategic plan for how you'll invest, what the organization's structure will be like, where to setup the fund (we held our account at Fidelity), explain your system of checks and balances, when you'll meet, what you'll discuss at meetings, what you'll do with the gains, what the typical time frame of an investment will be (I advise against anything less than 6mo), what products you'll be investing in (I suggest only equities to begin), walk them through an example pitch, put together a group of 10+ people to show there's a workforce behind it, plan for quarterly meetings to update the endowment peeps, etc.
Just listing things as I think of them. Essentially, you need to show them in every possible way that your group will invest this money wisely and not day trade it all to $0.
Thank you, everybody for your comments. What about the information and trading software? What software is mostly used?
Do not concentrate all your efforts on trading. Networking is very important. You could organize conferences/workshops for students in your school. This way your fund will get some recognition. This will make it easier to get some funding. Also, it will put your fund on the map and may latter help you guys get a job.
Setting up an Investment Club - Legal Issues (Originally Posted: 05/13/2014)
Hi Everyone, I am starting a small trading group with a couple of my friends. We plan on pooling our money together, then doing algorithmic trading with that pool. As I research ways to do this legally, so that it is set up as a partnership, I thought I'd turn to the ol' WSO. We want to form a partnership, with ownership of the intellectual property in equal parts and capital payouts in relation to the partner's respective principle. Obviously the partners would not incur management fees and at this time, we do not plan on soliciting investors.
Have any of you set up a legal prop shop or investment club with legal parameters? If so, how did you go about doing it? If not, any suggestions?
Thanks
Why go through the trouble of setting up a legal structure when it's just going to be between a small group of friends?
@HFer
The two main reasons are
to have ownership over the algorithms and processes in case this is made into a business or sold to another investment firm
To ensure correct distribution of gains.
Nice post.
never set one up, what I'd do is look at a local investment club in your area and call their secretary/treasurer/legal person. they won't charge you anything to ask a question and they might let you know about some state-specific laws. if not, I'd look at Cornell's legal library, possibly find a 3L at a local law school in your network and ask him/her, they will at least know where to look to find the answer even if they don't know the answer.
if all else fails, hire an attorney.
Hey Bankn - what did you end up doing? I'm in a similar situation, a few guys want to pool our funds to do some angel investing. Same thing, investing our own money not OPM, not drawing advisory fees - but need to invest from a pooled fund since our individual pro-rata contributions wouldn't clear the minimum investment criteria. Curious to hear what you learned ...
URGENT! Forming an investment club (Originally Posted: 06/29/2017)
Hi,
so I'm an intern in a company and as part of my project, we visited a high school to have some students open an account with us. now I'm being required to coordinate the formation of an investment club. how do i go about its. my presentation is in some few hours. i really need help!
1) Find a student that is intrigued by financial markets and is willing to lead the club 2) Bring up interesting subjects that will attract students to the club (stock trading competitions, bi/weekly stock discussions, etc) 3) Discuss the importance of financial literacy and how important finance is for their future
This feels like a troll post. What kind of company sends you to a high school to form a club?
Na it feels more like a high-school kid who wants to form a club but is too lazy to figure out how so he's looking for somebody else to do all of the thinking for him.
1) Make the members pay an entrance fee and tell them you'll invest the money for them 2) Have people talk and get more people to invest 3) Start paying out to early investors the returns from the investments of new investors 4) Profit ($500 maybe?!?) 5) Graduate
Investment club to company? to hedge fund? (Originally Posted: 11/01/2017)
Hi,
My friends and I are looking to start a track of record. While I am doing research, I notice a term "Investment Club". I am wondering if its possible later on to convert an investment club to hedge fund/investment company with the track of record.
I am also wondering what is the best way to start a track of record with small amount of cash. And non of us has experiences and licenses.
I have active Series 7 and 66 from the previous job but I assume no use in this case.
Thanks
Hey FLOMASTER, sorry about the delay, but are any of these useful:
More suggestions...
You're welcome.
help starting a investment club at a uni (Originally Posted: 05/04/2011)
Hey guys...I go to a state non target which doesn't really have any legit finance EC's on campus. We have a finance & econ club but it is a complete joke. I want to start something investment/trading related. A couple of ideas...
1.) start an investment club where we just have speakers come in and/or meet weekly to discuss our opinions on the markets
2.) start an investment club where we could meet weekly to invest with a virtual fund to start and then hopefully eventually be able to raise some real money to use..sort of like the bigger schools' student run investment funds.
3.) see if I could get the school to use some money to buy a small trading desk. Then the students could learn bloomberg and other useful tools while still in school.
I was wondering what is some of your opinions on these ideas?? My biggest concern is I do not really know any finance kids right now because I am a math major, and I am not sure which one would be most appealing to the students. thanks
one that actually invests money. right after internship experience it was my #1 talking point in interviews.
I helped start one up at my non-target school. You need to do all three of those things. It will be tough but I'm sure it will come off as great experience.
I started one at the state school I am going to. Making it isn't tough, finding good people that go to a state school is.
Not sure if this is helpfful Mike Bella from SMB capital started the trading group at Penn State and made a pretty good guide.
smbtraining dot com/blog/building-your-college-trading-club
thanks guys....still in the process of finding the right prof and the right people to start. Bourbon hit it right on the head, finding good dedicated students is what I am most scared of. Also thanks to the link..great resource
From experience and first hand observation (my school has 2 such organizations and another on the way, all with independent real money funds), it needs to be a progressive approach and you want to think carefully about your timeline.
Even the easiest steps - #1 and #2 with virtual funds can be time consuming.
Doing #2 with real money will probably take you at least a year before you're established enough to convince the school and alumni to give funding for it.
4 will come very easily after #3 is achieved...Has anyone been able to raise outside money for their club? And any tips how to do that?
.
College Investment Club Budget (Originally Posted: 11/06/2012)
Hello all, I am running my schools investment club. We have $1,000 to spend in roughly one month. If we don’t spend it we risk not receiving any funding for next semester. I was wondering if any of you guys had any ideas on how we could spend a good portion of our money. Sadly this cannot be put into our funds under AUM. We had a trip planned but hurricane sandy really screwed us. Any ideas would be great.
Call your broker ask if you can prepay any commissions. Not technically under AUM.
-Pizza -Beer -Hookers (although 1k won't quite get you the value package)
Are there any journals(FT, WSJ, etc) that you don't have access to yet? If not than buy CFA study materials and lease it out to members. Not very hard to spend 1k.
pay out as a bonus to the person running the club
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