Clockwise from bottom center, Shane Cotriss, Heather Edde, Hunter Carroll, Andrew Cox and Kimberly Guo.
Support the UTC team
- The Regional Finals will be broadcast via livestream: Americas Regional Final – Livestream from Boston; March 20, 4:30 p.m. EDT.
- Join the conversation and follow along the latest Twitter Feed from our 2018 Americas Regional Challenge by using our hashtag #ResearchChallenge.
- Send your team a message of support to @YOURUNIVERSITYHANDLE
team in the 2018 Americas Regional @ResearchChallenge.
Call it the Olympics of finance. It has the adrenaline-rush of the luge, the thoughtful planning of figure skating, the teamwork of hockey and the deft touch of curling.
The College Finance Association Investment Research Challenge pits college students from across the country against each other, all with the goal of doing the best in-depth and results-oriented research on a specific company. With numbers in hand, each team creates a report with a buy, sell, or hold recommendation, then presents and defends their choice to a panel of industry professionals.
Expert analysis in hand, UTC’s team is heading to the Regional Finals championship for the second straight year.
The team won the Greater Tennessee competition and is headed to Boston to compete on March 20 in the Americas challenge against 54 other universities.
“As a team we are extremely excited to represent UTC on such a large scale,” says team member Shane Cotriss. “This is such a great opportunity for us and we worked many long, hard hours preparing for competition. With that, we are heading to Boston very confident with our report and presentation as we hope for another win.”
Dr. Hunter Holzhauer, faculty advisor to the team and UC Foundation assistant professor of finance and economics in the College of Business, calls the team’s win in the Greater Tennessee competition “a really impressive victory considering how much recognition this competition gets in the investment community.
“This is what our students are trained to do and this is how we can measure our students against students form our other regional institutions of learning,” he says.
If UTC succeeds in Boston, it will be one of five teams in the Global Finals. But just making it to the Americas contest is a major feat and a chance to shine in front of an important crowd, Holzhauer says.
“If you make it to the Americas competition, your team of students can expect to meet several of the best and brightest students and future analysts from around North and South America,” he says. “They can also expect to meet recruiters for some of the most well-known companies in the investments industry. It’s a very big deal.
“To our students, their victory is confirmation that all of their hard work is paying off.”
