Stock Pitch Sample Template - Proven Examples to Help Ace Your Interview

Sid Arora

Reviewed by

Sid Arora

Expertise: Investment Banking | Hedge Fund | Private Equity

Updated:

January 31, 2022

Stock pitches have been a part of finance interviews since the dawn of man. People typically underestimate the importance of pitches in an interview, but think about it this way: if you’re interviewing for a position at any sort of financial institution - hedge fund, private equity firm, investment bank, etc. - how can you be expected to perform your job competently if you lack a solid pitch? Even for investment banking analysts, whose job consists less of investment research and more of Excel work, it’s integral to be ready to pitch a stock.

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The Stock Pitch in an Interview

These positions rely on preparation and due diligence to mind-numbing degrees, so it’s critical that you demonstrate both of these characteristics with a well-researched pitch. Here’s @WhiteHat", a hedge fund analyst, on its importance.

[quote “WhiteHat – Hedge Fund Analyst”]For many positions, the pitch is the biggest part of the interview. It gives the interviewee the opportunity to explain his or her thought process and the way they evaluate an investment opportunity. It can separate the fakers from the legitimate candidates. In many cases, it can be the difference between being asked back and being sent home. But there's no class you can take that teaches you to properly pitch a stock.
[/quote]

There is no class on how to pitch a stock, so let this be your learning center. Included, in addition to our own guide, is a video detailing the pitch and what goes into it courtesy of the WallStreetOasis Video Library and a PDF (attached at the bottom) that includes a visual summary as well as an example.

Stock Pitch Example

Ann is an industry veteran with plenty of tips for your hedge fund interview. At 06:59, she discusses generating stock ideas. At 10:30, she goes over what makes a good pitch. And at 15:55, she gives an example of a pitch.

This video is courtesy of the WallStreetOasis Video Library, which contains 100+ exclusive videos curated by industry professionals to help guide you through the world of finance.

 

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Investment Idea Generation

Put yourself in the shoes of a hedge fund: you’ve narrowed an open position down to two candidates. Both check all of the boxes. Excellent qualifications, fit with the firm, the works. One comes from a top university with a perfect GPA; the other from a top 25 university with a 3.65. When you have two candidates like this, do you separate them by academics, or do you look at their investment evaluations?

Let’s assume the second candidate nails the pitch with an excellent idea backed up by thorough research, while the first candidate pitches a run-of-the-mill stock with the requisite research but nothing beyond the surface level. We take the candidate who nailed the pitch.

Generating ideas for investments isn’t easy. Otherwise passive funds wouldn’t occupy a third of the market. Here’s @BlackHat", a hedge fund partner on why you need to be able to generate your own original ideas.

[quote “BlackHat – Hedge Fund Partner”]
Believe it or not, an alarming number of managers (with similar strategies, of course) are looking at the same set of companies at a given time. Put simply, most analysts are incapable of consistently sourcing new ideas on their own.

While no idea can be truly original, being one of the first and/or one of the few to discover a drastically mispriced security, impending catalyst, etc., is how an analyst or firm can make a killing in a hurry. By the time your indexers (think asset managers, overly-diversified hedge funds, etc.) and dumb money (momentum, retail investors) are in, the return potential is mostly behind them. What's left is often little more than just a market return.[/quote]

So how do you go about generating ideas? First, according to @BlackHat", a hedge fund partner, there are two classes of ideas: abstract methods and common methods. First are the three abstract methods. These are the methods you should use to find a good stock to pitch.

  • Management or industry referrals: Obtaining information from an executive beyond the surface level. Effective without a doubt, but far more circumstantial, which is why we will only cover it briefly.
  • Thematic investing: Identifying themes that indicate sectors ripe for the investing.
  • Industry vertical stripping: Finding where the margin is going in a value chain from the basic supplier(s), to the supplier(s), to the end user(s)

Onto the first abstract method of idea generation for pitches, management or industry referrals. This goes beyond asking an executive what they think of competitors in the industry and the like. If you simply ask an exec what they think of a competitor, you'll get a prim and proper answer. You have to mine for the information. Diamonds don't come easy. There’s an art to it explained by @BlackHat", a hedge fund partner.

[quote “BlackHat – Hedge Fund Partner”]If you ask them who scares them the most in the enterprise business and they say it's Microsoft, now you have a free avenue to start talking specifically about what MSFT does well and what advantages they have over everyone else. (At the end of the day, most of this is common sense in social interaction...)

Other questions I like to ask: is the industry entirely rational, or is there anyone you think is throwing the industry out of whack? Is there anyone you would consider a good fit for your business, either to acquire or as a strategic partner? Is there a certain manager in the industry you respect (or dislike) most? Who else is taking share and why?[/quote]

The next method of idea generation is far less circumstantial: thematic investing. Think about the high-level themes that point to a certain sector with optimistic projections. From there, your due diligence finds the few companies to focus on.

Here’s @BlackHat", a hedge fund partner, on thematic investing with an example and how you go about it.

[quote “BlackHat – Hedge Fund Partner”]The most current example I can think of to describe this is the insanity surrounding firearms and ammunition since the beginning of the Obama administration, and accelerated by Sandy Hook and other mass-shootings.

The theme in this case was obvious: certain types of ammunition and "assault rifles" were going to be under heavy scrutiny and began flying off the shelves at any dealer you could think of. The tough part isn't identifying the validity of the theme - this one was actually very easy to validate - but picking apart the sector to find the best way to invest in it.[/quote]

The last means you should use to find stocks to pitch is industry vertical stripping. This is an awesome, readily available, yet rarely used technique for idea generation. Why is that the case? Because it's easier to start swinging your ax at the tree right away than it is to first sharpen your ax.

Vertical stripping is the process of mapping out, in clear detail, "the value chain of an industry from the most basic supplier to the end user, in order to identify all the companies along the way, with the objective of finding where all the margin is going" (@BlackHat" – Hedge Fund Partner).

Here's @BlackHat", a hedge fund partner, with his favorite example of vertical stripping.

[quote “BlackHat – Hedge Fund Partner”]Our favorite example is the airline industry: it's been around forever yet is known as being a terribly competitive and unreliable business... despite the fact that we continue to pay higher and higher airfare for basically the exact same service! So where's all the margin going? Well, at the top, there's the aircraft OEMs (BA, EADSY) operating a duopoly, and even above them, the engine manufacturers who are highly consolidated with only three major players (GE, UTX, RR) and a duopoly above that in investment castings (AA, PCP).[/quote]

Most of these businesses earn solid returns on capital, and through industry vertical stripping, we've already discovered some businesses worth researching. Now you have to look below the plane makers and start thinking about how aircraft are distributed among airlines. Once airlines have planes, there are other supportive businesses that come into play. Upon researching, we find a couple of businesses with absurd returns on capital. Now you see how industry vertical stripping works and the enchanting results it can produce.

These are the three techniques of abstract idea generation. These techniques go beyond what the majority is doing, therefore increasing your likelihood of finding golden geese. We prefer thematic investing and industry vertical stripping to industry management referrals because of availability.

@Simple As...", a hedge fund vice president, gave insight on how his idea generation methodology is a combination of two of the above.

[quote “SimpleAs… - Hedge Fund Vice President”]I often find myself combining thematic investing and "industry vertical stripping", too. Say I find a product/trend that I think can be huge. I will usually break down the value chain to determine the best way to monetize this trend. I think you kind of implied this in the write-up, but maybe it wasn't as obvious to some others. Or maybe I'm just way off base and have been doing it wrong, ha ha.[/quote]

Things to Not Do in The Stock Pitch

These are the most common methods of finding investment ideas. While you may find it acceptable to utilize these techniques to find stocks, we recommend avoiding them since common methods lead to common investment ideas, and the pitch is something that can make or break you - especially if you’re interviewing for a private equity firm or hedge fund. The three methods to avoid are as follows.

Quantitative screening: Screening based on quantitative characteristics. There are three disadvantages to this approach.

  1. They're easy to run. (Everyone is already using them. They don't add much value.)
  2. Trailing/forward numbers may be based off something cyclical or one-time, making the valuation less meaningful.
  3. Ignores catalysts.

Quantitative Screening for Stocks

As the name suggests, this is simply the construction of a list of securities that fit your specified quantitative characteristics. These are used most often to filter for statistical cheapness on a P/E, EV/EBITDA, FCF Yield, or other valuation metric, but can also be used to screen for companies of a certain quality based on margins, ROIC, ROE, etc. An efficient way to build a watch list of companies that appear very cheap while still having financial results within your specified parameters.

Sell-side/word of mouth: Pitches from sell-side fellows or anyone else for that matter. Once the pitch is made, the cat is likely out of the bag, and the current price won't be nearly as good, which is a key disadvantage of word-of-mouth ideas.

Warnings About Ideas from the Sell-Side or from Word of Mouth

Most monkeys on WSO have probably heard enough pitches to know how common idea generation by word of mouth / idea sharing is in the industry. But here's the thing about other people's ideas: most analysts share ideas with more conviction than they'd have with their own money.

The sell-side is another source of ideas, albeit a non-BlackHat approved one, since a buy rating isn't exactly worth the same amount coming from the brokers.

Sifting through holdings from public equity firms:

Getting Investment Ideas from Hedge Fund Public Disclosures: 13-Fs

These are as much a goldmine of good ideas as they are of misinformation. Something to keep in mind when combing through 13-Fs is that plenty of funds like to "window dress" their portfolios at the end of the quarter to mask certain investments or appear to be holding names through the quarter that they really didn't have.

Also, since short positions and international equities are not reported, you never quite know what's going on under the hood, even with the longs. To state the obvious, 13-Fs aren't going to give you any indication of what the actual reason for holding a security is.

Again, common techniques generate common pitches. Considering the gravity of the pitch, we can’t recommend using the common methods detailed above to find investment ideas.

Research for Stock Pitch

While we advocate using the abstract methods to generate atypical investment ideas regardless of whether you’re applying to an investment bank, hedge fund, or private equity firm, the research process varies depending on the type of firm. The buy-side is all about investment evaluation, so the research process for a stock pick for a buy-side firm will have to be far more thorough and long-winded than for an investment bank.

For investment banking pitches, a couple days of research starting out with a good set of investment ideas will suffice. But for the buy-side, candidates often spend weeks or months finding and researching stocks for pitches. The reason is often the same reason they want to work for buy-side firms to begin with; some people enjoy immersing themselves in the markets and identifying exceptional investment opportunities.

We recommend reading all of what @Simple As...", a hedge fund vice president, has to say as its value is incredible. Most of you will ignore the piece, but the ones who don't are the ones who go the distance, the ones who have the edge come interview. For those of you who don't want to go the distance, here's an incredibly unjust summary of what @Simple As..." had to say.

What to Research for Your Interview?

  1. What drives revenue? How does a business make money?
  2. Competitive Positioning: Select a universe of competitors with an understanding of what drives the business. Then ask these three questions:
    • How does the market see my target?
    • How do competitors see my target?
    • How do customers see my target?
  3. Management: Analyze management's (Board of Directors) compensation and incentives to see if they align with what you want as a shareholder. In addition, judge the merit of their decisions (capital allocations based on realized returns and future positioning).
  4. Financials: Tear the company to pieces line-item by line-item as deep as you can, going back usually five to seven years.
  5. Speak with management (inapplicable to you)
  6. Model and valuation: Create a model from scratch over a long period of time as questions will come up throughout the process. The valuation method in skeletal form:
    • Derive projections from thesis.
    • Stress-test projections.
    • Derive range of values for the business.

    Value defined as a product of growth, returns, and cost of capital (also called the discount rate or required return). @Simple As...", a hedge fund vice president: "What’s more important – in my opinion – than a scientific and precise valuation is that you understand what is going to cause the market to realize the intrinsic value of the asset and that you get the timing of the catalyst correct.

  7. The pitch: An aspect which we cover extensively below.

What to Include in the Investment Pitch

You’ve generated some exceptional investment ideas. Now what? Pitching a stock is a process. Once you’ve found the ideas, it’s time to research to find the winner. Your research forms the greatest part of your pitch, it's the spine of the entire thing. You just have to organize it in a clear manner that effectively depicts the appeal in your idea.

There are four facets of your investment that must be included: industry overview, company-specific overview, where the market is wrong, and valuation.

Here’s what you need to know from @WhiteHat", a hedge fund analyst.

  1. Industry Overview: Outline the industry and make the case for why it's an attractive industry for investment.
    Consider the following questions:
    • What makes this industry economically viable?
    • What makes the barriers to entry high enough to keep competition from destroying these economics?
    • What is pricing power like, and why do consumers accept it?
  2. Company-Specific Overview: Where the company you're pitching fits into the market.
  3. Where the market is wrong: Point out why the security might be underpriced, what the catalyst(s) will be that changes this, and why you think that catalyst will happen.
  4. Valuation: What's important to know is the multiples for your company, the industry, and why there is a difference or should be a difference. This will usually relate to whatever it is the street is missing. Be sure to know the basics of your company's capital structure and what valuation metrics are important. This is a good opportunity to demonstrate that you're not stupid and know when to use EV/EBITDA over P/E or something else. Also important is some notion of a price target post-catalyst, and some estimation of what you think would happen to the stock price if the catalyst worked against you. This gives the interviewer a chance to see that you understand what risk/reward is.

Understanding these four things, you should be able to keep them in mind while researching the ideas you already generated. At that point, you decide which stock you want to pitch and include these four things in your pitch.

Here are four more things to include, from @derivstrading", a retired S&T analyst:

[quote “derivstrading – S&T Analyst”]

  1. What is the catalyst for the stock? Why hasn't the catalyst been priced in yet?
  2. The trade details (timeframe, stop loss, profit target, any strategies, i.e., tiered buying/selling)
  3. What has the stock has done over the past three months/years? What have the key drivers been?
  4. What has the stock has done relative to the index (drag historical prices and calculate a correlation/beta factor)?

[/quote]

Now you know what to cover in your pitch. Typical length ranges from five to ten minutes. You don’t want to go over that as you want to keep the interviewer’s attention. In addition, you want to keep around at least five minutes, so you cover all your bases.

Written Stock Pitch

Many hedge fund analyst job postings ask for a written pitch. The general length of these written pitches is one to two pages, although you can certainly go over that if you want. The point is they don’t want an opus explaining every thought you’ve had; save it for the job. Hedge funds simply want to see how you evaluate an investment opportunity.

This layout provided by @WhiteHat", a hedge fund analyst, covers all of your bases and is an effective way to organize your letter.

[quote “WhiteHat – Hedge Fund Analyst”]

  1. Introduction: Briefly explain the business, competitors, major industry metrics, etc.
  2. General Recommendation: Are we looking at this as a short or a long? What's our time frame?
  3. Why Now: What makes it attractive now? Why does the market love/hate the stock all the sudden?
  4. Commentary/Catalysts: Is the market justified in its love/hate? What could happen to make stock rise/fall? What would the metrics look like if each catalyst happened?
  5. Explanation: Why is the catalyst most likely in favor of your recommendation? Why is the other unlikely? What research brought you to this conclusion?
  6. Valuation: Briefly explain historic valuation, industry multiple, earnings growth potential, and what kind of return you think we can get (and over what time horizon), and the same for if downside catalyst happens.
  7. [/quote]

    Stock Pitch Letter Examples

    Even with the layout above, starting out might seem overwhelming. It’s not an easy thing to do, formulating a letter clearly illustrating your beliefs with the understanding that you will get critiqued by industry professionals on both your opinion and your writing. Luckily, we have you covered in terms of identifying good investment ideas and knowing what to research. In addition to the above layout, which will help immensely in preparing your pitch, here are some real-world examples:

    Autozone

    Doral

    There are two overarching factors of your letter you should keep in mind, according to @Gray Fox", a hedge fund analyst.

    1. Why your view is differentiated from the consensus
    2. Why your view is correct.

    Original Thread - How to Pitch a Stock

    So, yesterday I was selected to participate in the Wharton Stock Pitch Competition. However, I have to submit a PowerPoint TODAY about the stock along with all of the information I plan on presenting. Also, I am presenting to two executives: one from Barclays and the other is from RBC.

    Now, I have no experience with this sort of thing and can use any advice/info that you guys can provide me.

    What do executives look for when someone is presenting a stock?
    What types of statistics or info should I use to back up my claim?
    How should I present it?
    Are there any techniques that people use to present/convince others that their idea is legit?

    Please. Anything helps.

Attachment Size
hedge_fund_interview_pitch_september_1.pdf 783.43 KB 783.43 KB

Sid Arora is a member of WSO Editorial Board which helps ensure the accuracy of content across top articles on Wall Street Oasis. Currently an investment analyst focused on the TMT sector at 1818 Partners (a New York Based Hedge Fund)... This content was originally created by member Will Hunting and has evolved with the help of our sales and trading mentors.

 

go beyond the information that the rest of the market has. That information is likely to be priced into the stock already.

Pick an industry you know well. (adult excluded). Use facts to support reasoning. not create reasoning to support facts (temperature in New York might correlate perfectly, but it's coincidence).

dont talk for the hell of it. Best stocks to pitch are not headline ones. Those are easy targets and show you pick your choices based on google.

avoid spewing out all the PE ratios etc. Some are helpful, some arent. Go with facts, NOT opinions.

 
Best Response

Make sure to have the following points covered:

1) What is the catalyst for the stock, why hasn't the catalyst been priced in yet? 2) The trade details (timeframe, stop loss, profit target, any strategies ie tiered buying/selling) 3) What the stock has done over the past 3 months/year, what have the key drivers been 4) What the stock has done relative to the index (drag historical prices and calculate a correlation/beta factor)

 

Agree with derivstrading's first point-easily the most important part is explaining the reason the market is wrong with the valuation, and what will corrrect this.

Example of a bad pitch:

"XX company is great, it has above average operating metrics, good industry trends, and trades at a lower multiple than its peers. It should at least trade even."

This pitch does not do the above, but is how must are structured. I did a pitch on transocean a few weeks after the oil spill, and it was basicly structured as follows:

"Before the spill, RIG was a leader in an industry with great long term prospects, and only traded at a X multiple. The rig it lost was fully insured. It also had insurance for XX dollars for personal claims, and the exxon valdez spill only amounted to a fraction of this. These claims were also paid out 18 years later, drastically reducing the PV. Since it is likely fully insured for damages, the only explanation for loss in market cap is reduction in earnings. Apart from temporary ban (can't go on forever), it only lost one rig, accounting for XX in earnings, so at a pre-spill multiple of X it should have reduced market cap by X. In actuality, it lost XX in market cap, overstating the damage by X times. Huge overreaction. Catalysts are a stopping of the ban and legal results, which are likely to play out favorably for the following reasons, etc. etc."

Obviously shortened my pitch to post here, but aside from people disagreeing with the simplified analysis, that's how a good pitch is at least structured IMO.

 

2 things I want to add...

1) Not to echo the two above points, but if you plan to go contrarian or use a pairs trade, be able to back it up with a reasonable argument. If you're going to do a short sale pick then explain why you want to short the stock instead of be long it, and make sure to focus in on the details behind your catalyst. Take Apple, if you see lower sales numbers, rising materials costs and say an earthquake that damaged a foreign manufacturing plant that made iPhone screens, then you would have a problem and enough of a catalyst argue for a short in Apple.

2) I've always found that discussing why or why not I like a particular position to be helpful as well when pitching it. Again, with the Apple short above, I would take a brief moment to discuss why you like the trade and why you are taking the position you are. It's easy to say I think Apple is going down, but it's much harder to say why you like the trade and why you're taking that side of the trade in a conscious effort.

 

This is the format that we generally follow - and by we i mean our investment fund. My school has a conference ever year that the best hedge fund starters on the Street come down to (Think Julian Robertson, John Paul Jones, Jim Chanos etc.), and there's always a student pitch competition as a part of the conference.

A general structure:

Company & industry overview (very quick run-down) + a few stats (e.g. market cap, multiples, current price etc.)

Investment Thesis (growth drivers)

Mispercetion (this is where, like all the above more experienced individuals mentioned, you should say why some factor you mentioned isn't already priced in, i.e. why the stock is undervalued, and why you have an "edge")

Catalysts/How it plays out

Recommendation (e.g. price target, strategy, etc.)

Just a reference. Disclaimer: I'm a student myself

I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them. ... If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.
 

Obviously it sounds good but I would personally keep it simple. I would at most talk about a stock for 30 seconds and conclude with three reasons to buy.

You don't want to overwhelm your interviewer for certain practical reasons too... For example, if your interviewer follows up with "Great, can you pitch another one," you will have to be as well-researched into another stock or two... If your first stock sounds great but your second pitch sounds shitty, you will end up looking foolish.

Secondly, anything you bring up will be fair game. If you mention 40 things in your complex pitch and one of them happens to be "projected future operational growth," you better know everything about "projected future operational growth." Whether it be growth profiles of comps, operational metrics or past/future data, you may be probed deeper on a topic. That is why a lot of people tend to be more conservative during interviews. If you mention everything you cited above, be ready to go into further depth another each and every one of those topics. Everything will be fair game so don't set yourself up for a trap...

And other things I would know just in case would be: -current share price (believe it or not, many people don't check this the day of the interview) -52-week high (and 52-week low) -one year price target (cite the target of a well-known research analyst, imo) -beta (and perhaps estimated cost of capital, if they really want to fuck with you) -total enterprise value (as well as market cap, total debt and cash) -trading comps (as well as current prices of comps) -company CEO

Believe it or not, I got asked about comps, total enterprise value (with breakdown of market cap and debt), and beta in prior interviews when asked to pitch a stock...

 

That seems like a long pitch to me, I agree with vancouver that you should try to keep it short and simple--and make sure you are prepared to back up anything you say with an explanation as you'll likely get interrupted.

I like to break it down into a companies quantitative/qualitative aspects for interviews. Talk about all the common metrics first relative to comps in the industry (P/E, PEG, EPS growth, market cap, 52week high/low, etc.) Talk about how their recent earnings went and the price as a result. Also, throw out some simple valuation multiples (EV/EBITDA, EV/EBITAR, others depending on the industry). Just cite specific numbers for each and move on.

Make sure to talk about some qual aspects as well--the companies management, their philosophy, customer base, brand differentiation, etc. Know who the companies competitors are and why your company is stronger.

Make sure you don't talk about stuff you can't elaborate on or you'll get burned.

 

IMO pick a stock that doesnt get as much coverage, perhaps in the small cap space. It's likely that the person your interviewing with won't know it as well as some of the large cap names that get a lot more research coverage, thus you wont have to defend your pick or field as many questions. Just my 2 cents.

Here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.
 

IMO pick a stock that doesnt get as much coverage, perhaps in the small cap space. It's likely that the person your interviewing with won't know it as well as some of the large cap names that get a lot more research coverage, thus you wont have to defend your pick or field as many questions. Just my 2 cents.

Here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.
 

This is why I hate some bits of finance. What a load of bollocks. None of the above matters! All that matters it the covariance risk of the stock and whether or not it's under or overvalued. The rest is just noise.

 
timothy0:
This is why I hate some bits of finance. What a load of bollocks. None of the above matters! All that matters it the covariance risk of the stock and whether or not it's under or overvalued. The rest is just noise.

sick strat bro... better start your own fund and rake before others figure this out

Here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.
 

Definitely pick out an obscure stock. If you're being interviewed by someone in the healthcare group, it doesn't matter how well researched your healthcare pick is, pitch a different stock in a different sector.

Also realize that anything you say is fair game for more questioning, so keep it as simple as possible. A few financial metrics to point out why it's undervalued, and strong qualitative reasoning behind it is your best approach.

Look at it this way: bankers don't know shit about investing. Your job as an analyst will not be to think, it will be to process. This question is just to show interest in finance and the markets in general. You have more to lose than to gain.

 

You're going to want to pitch your story that is in-line with what their belief systems are.

Here are some examples of implying you understand the concepts is the following:

  1. Buzz phrases - Believe selling is "Overdone" at these levels because people have "baked in" a quarter that implies "units/volume/metric" is going to be down severely on a y/y basis.
  2. Technicals - Pull up a 20/50 day moving average and find and indicator to help back your argument, just pased XYZ moving average
  3. Disasters - Maybe there was a "blow up quarter" last year in this space, use hurricane sandy as an example... as soon as that hit you could have pitched generac. Or you can use a y/y basis and compare it to say when the Japanese Tsunami hit and the compares in that quarter on a relative basis to the (insert most impacted industry) will be better
  4. Read throughs - Say for wahtever reason every single comparable company printed awesome numbers in units of XYZ... Your company directly works with XYZ so therefore likely upside this time around versus prior
  5. Pricing - Say the company you are pitching has extremely high exposure to "copper" or any other component could be a semiconductor etc... So you say "margins should expand" and the stock hasnt moved since the pricing of said component has dropped XYZ percent
 

Target: UUU CN - Uranium One (Canada listed, Kazakh Uranium miner) Cyclically depressed post-Fukushima, the stock represents a good value trade on mean reversion alone. The story gets better on the fundamental side: global nuclear power plant construction is at record highs (thanks to China, Russia, South Korea, and India) but uranium mining is not keeping pace. For the last 15 years Uranium prices have been kept low while Russia & US have been running plants on fuel taken from excess Russian weapons: this contract ended in 2012. The main risk for the stock is competition from natural gas, but the shale boom is thus far contained to the US.

 

I would give you 3 pieces of advice:

1) Pick a company you know. Not just by name but their basic operations. For example, everyone knows Apple and primarily what drives their sales. Conversely, I wouldn't pick a semiconductor or oil & gas name unless I am knowledgeable in the sector.

2) Pick a well-known company. Pick a company that people know and has a following in the market. The better the following the more research you can do online and the more info you'll find.

3) This is more of a personal tip but I would look at the micro environment as well. For example, pick a consumer retail name if you think consumers will have more money to spend (due to low oil prices or economic data, etc.) I would mention this briefly in your pitch as it shows your approach/ thinking.

As for the actual pitch, if on an interview, I would keep it to 2-3 minutes. First, spend a minute on why you like the name from an operations/catalyst standpoint. Then spend the other minute on your model and valuation, why its trading at a discount or premium, comps and where you think the intrinsic value of the stock is.

Recent College Graduate
 
 

I think, that what you should do is think about stocks that you know you know well. Basically, pitching a stock is the same as pitching a company. So if you want to short something, you have to pick out the reason why you think, that the stock is bad. If you want to go long on something else, you have to find out if the company is undervalued and how it can outperform its competitors/market.

You should focus on:

Business Profile/ Growth Driver/ Valuation(vs competitors); P/E, EV/EBITDA(R)

 

Try and have a good organizational structure to your pitch. For example if you are allowed to bring a slide deck, I'd structure it as the following:(Even if you can't bring a slide deck, still format your answer in a similar way - Industry Overview(1 slide) - Company Overview (2 slides) - Investment Thesis (2-3 slides)--This is the bulk of your argument and position - Catalysts and Risk (1 slide) -Valuation(1-2 slides)- Probably wouldn't need to do a DCF, but maybe include comps

Hopefully that helps. Good Luck!

 

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