“CFA stands for Chartered Financial Analyst. It’s the designation of choice in the investment profession,” said Mark Cherrington, faculty advisor for the team. “Each year they have a research competition where students not yet hired in the industry can join in this competition and do initial coverage research of a publicly held company. It’s a statewide competition, and the company chosen for Utah was Pluralsight. Pluralsight is a publicly traded company located in Farmington that does education software for computer programmers.”

“In order to be on the team and compete you have to be in your senior year or be a master's student,” said Jen Receveur. “Tanner was our only undergrad, and he's an economic major. He's wicked smart; he was our valuation specialist.”

The team consisted of Robert Hafen, Jackie Choto, Tanner Talbott, Jen Receveur, Yoonji Lee, and Ammon Christensen. Mark Cherrington, Cary Wasden, and Vaughn Cox served as faculty advisors.

“The CFA is like an ethics society,” continued Jen. “They really want to bring ethical thinking into the financial market so that they can retain its integrity. We wanted to make sure we were following all the rules because they sent us 15 pages of rules for this project, and we wanted to make sure we weren't violating any of them. As we were going through, we realized that Ammon works for a financial services company, and that's one of the things you cannot do to compete.”

 “[UVU] started out with three teams, but only two teams can submit papers. We had everyone working on papers, and when Ammon had to drop out we said, ‘Okay guys, we need to come together and merge teams because we're going to be short people.’ There were two teams of five or six, and eventually we decided that it would be better to combine teams and submit one really great paper rather than submit two mediocre papers. Those most passionate about this competition were the ones that remained on the team.”

“It’s a big time commitment,” explained Mark. “The team had to put together a 10-page report on Pluralsight for the competition, and the top five research reports were selected to present at the Marriott in Salt Lake City. There were nine papers in total that were submitted, and almost every university in Utah registered for the competition, such as BYU, University of Utah, Utah State, Weber, SUU, etc. It started off with all the teams doing a meet-and-greet at Pluralsight’s headquarters with the CFO. He presented on the company and held a Q&A. That meeting included all of the students from these different places, and some even phoned in.”

“Our team’s strategy was to have each person write one page each day on Pluralsight. Each of them would spend time each week writing a page worth of whatever they wanted to on this company. One would focus on competitors, one would focus on the product, and so on. Every week they’d have five pages that they were generating, and towards the end they had to condense it all into 10 pages. It involved pulling out the most important things and have it flow with our rating. They submitted their paper in December. The five teams left after the weeding out process were: two from Utah State, University of Utah, Westminster, and our UVU team.”

“One of the biggest struggles we had was overanalyzing-- analysis paralysis,” said Jen. “We had hundreds of pages of analysis that we were doing, and then coming together and condensing it to 10 pages. It was really difficult when it came down to it. I'm an outline-type person and I really like structure. I pulled together the requirements of the paper and made sure that we hit every point because we didn’t just want to fuel our own thoughts and opinions. We pulled everyone's pieces and said, ‘We have to answer this question, let's see who's talked about it.’ If we were missing something it meant that we had to do more research. We were working on this almost every weekend late at night. There were times when we were here until midnight or one in the morning.”

“In the presentation you had 10 minutes to present to a panel of three judges that work in the industry,” said Mark. “They then had 10 minutes of question and answer where they were grilled on what they presented. Then the judges deliberated and went on to the next team.”

“Half of our grade was on our paper and half of it was on our presentation,” said Jen. “For our paper section they sent it to three graders, and each grader looked at the rubric and gave us a score, and then they average those three scores together. That was 50 percent, and then those three graders ranked us. They came up to us afterwards and said that we did a really great job.”

“In the paper you say it’s a buy, a hold, or a sell,” said Mark. “The price of Pluralsight’s stock is around $30 in the market currently.”

“We were the only team that said sell,” said Ammon Christensen. “It was funny because we were talking to another team and asked them what their evaluation was and they said $34, and when they asked us we said $7. That's a huge difference!”

“Usually the market is always going to go up,” added Jen, “so a $34 buy rate is conservative and good, and we were like, ‘Yeah that's a fair argument,’ and then to come out there and be like, "We think it's worth nothing [laughter].”

“What was really cool is that throughout the presentation when we said our initial rating of sell at a $7 price rating, you could see the shock on the judges’ faces. Throughout the presentation as we explained our reasoning you could see them thinking, ‘Okay, I can run with that, I can see that.’ At the end, one of the guys on the end said, ‘Well this is a very bold prediction.’”

“When you come out with a bold statement like that, you know what kind of questions are going to be asked,” said Ammon. “The team did a really good job of preparing and answering the questions, and they had the slides all ready to go.”

“First and second place had drastically different price ratings, but they were judging the thought process behind it and how well it was presented,” said Mark. “We ended up coming just shy of first and one of the Utah State teams won, but our team did great. They presented well, they looked polished, and they seemed to handle the judges’ questions well. Each team member came away with a $200 gift card. Altogether as a team it was $1,000 and second place in a state competition, going up against some of the best students in the state. They did well and should all be proud of what they did. They put a ton of work and the judges really seemed to like it. Each student spent 100+ hours on this competition. In the end, the judges said this was the closest they’ve ever seen it. Jackie spoke to one of the judges afterwards and they told her it was within .6 of a point between first and second.”

“When we were at the dinner for the awards, one guy that was working at a real estate investment company made a point of telling the students on the team, ‘Hey, we’re looking to hire right now if you’re interested.’ There were employers there that were courting our team. This is an impressive competition; it’s a lot of work and it’s something they can put on a resume. Especially if they go into the investment industry, I could see someone asking about the research. They put so much time and energy into it that they can have a truly high-level discussion, and that’s a real positive for a resume and interview.”

“It was a great learning experience and something great to put on my resume,” said Robert Hafen.

“I work at a wealth management firm, and I showed our report to one of my colleagues that's above me in investment research,” said Ammon. “I noticed that I received a lot more responsibility right after I showed it to him.”

“Overall experience, it was good because I learned I don't want to do this as a fulltime job [laughter],” joked Jen. “Rob does. Tanner does. The majority of my team probably learned that they could do this fulltime. We wrote an initial coverage report on Disney prior to doing this one, and I brought it into an interview. The report looks very professional and is fun to show off. I got offered a job at Goldman Sachs and accepted, and one of the people I was interviewing with was a CFA charterholder, and he used to judge the CFA Research Challenge. I went in with my report for Disney, which was a buy rating, and Pluralsight was a sell rating. I was able to go into the interview and say, ‘Let me tell you about this company.’ I was just selling him on the evaluations we did and the analysis. We didn't even have typical interview questions and I feel like that was a huge reason why.”