Spring 2012 - Georgetown University: Web hosting

good way for them to get a different view
from other people about the market and
what to invest in.”
Stoeckle also led a team of 10 MBA students
who applied and were chosen by the
school to compete in CNBC’s Million Dollar
Portfolio Challenge MBA Face-Off. The
business-news cable network has sponsored
the investment competition for several years
and invited the general public to participate
for the chance to win $1 million, though
2011 marked the first time the competition
added a student component. Teams of
MBA students from Georgetown and seven
other schools — Carnegie Mellon, Cornell,
Ohio State, University of Chicago, Michigan,
Notre Dame, and University of Texas at
Austin — were each given a million virtual
“CNBC Bucks” to establish portfolios and
make mock trades of pre-selected stocks
and currencies on the U.S., London, and
Australian exchanges. The nine-week competition
ran from Sept. 19 until Nov. 25,
with the teams vying for bragging rights,
plus an iPad 2 for each member of the winning
team. The Georgetown McDonough
team finished in fourth place, though one
of its members, Angel Irazola (MBA EP
’12), was an individual winner.
Stoeckle was asked to head up the Hoyas
team of seven full-time students and three
from the MBA Evening Program by Meg
VanDeWeghe, a professor of the practice
and the faculty adviser for the competition,
as well as for the Graduate Investment
Fund. “The school was looking for people
with a strong finance background and who
could work well together,” Stoeckle says.
“Ten percent of our investments had to be
in currencies, so they wanted students with
that type of experience, too.”
Once the team was assembled, they
agreed on a diversified strategy and identified
several themes to concentrate on: M&A,
earnings, leveraged ETFs (exchange-traded
funds, which are investment funds traded
on stock exchanges), currencies, and commodities.
Each student then developed his
or her own portfolio and was responsible
for compiling and analyzing research and
making buy and sell decisions. “We met as
a group several times during the competition
to share information, and we would
email each other anytime to ask questions,
exchange ideas, offer suggestions, or pass
along news items,” Stoeckle says. The competition
featured a daily “Bonus Bucks”
contest, giving participants the chance to
win up to an extra 6,000 CNBC Bucks for
their portfolios by correctly answering
three trivia questions.
VanDeWeghe and several other faculty
members were available to the students, but
otherwise encouraged the team to be independent.
“It was great knowing they were there if
we needed help,” says Stoeckle, who received
a few tips from the school’s communications
department before doing a live interview on
CNBC. The Georgetown Center for Financial
Markets and Policy also supported the students
throughout the competition.
Irazola had a particularly strong showing.
“There were three performance categories
— one for equity, one for currency,
and a third combining those two,” explains
Irazola, a third-year MBA Evening Program
student majoring in finance who
has worked at Merrill Lynch in Washington
for 10 years in its wealth management
division. “I was the only participant in the
MBA competition who ranked in the top
Matt Stoeckle, Samantha Chow, Angel Irazola,
Temi Akinola, Sean Baker, Sean Sun, Adam
Kelinsky, Christina Oh, Ingrid Velmonte, and
Osman Jen represented the school in CNBC’s
Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge MBA Face-Off.