(Left to right)  Aamir Hajidatoo,Roberto Morales, Yihao (Ethan) Peng,and Dr. Rama Malladi out to eat to celebrate their participation and win in the 2021- 2022 CFA Institute Research Challenge. Photo Courtesy of Aamir Hajidatoo

Brenda Fernanda Verano, Editor in Chief

A group from the California State University, Dominguez Hills finance club won second place in the local Chartered Finance Analyst Institute (CFA), Institute Research Challenge, last month. The competition, which tests participants on their analytical, valuation, report writing, and presentation skills as research analysts, was held on Feb. 18 via Zoom. 

Aamir Hajidatoo, a fall 2021 graduate, Roberto Morelos and Yihao (Ethan) Peng, both seniors majoring in finance, all represented CSUDH at the competition. . Although small in numbers, they were able to take home the runner up position, beating schools like the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), Pepperdine University, Loyola Marymount, amongst other universities in the state, many of which had students with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Masters in Financial Engineering (MFE). 

The CSUDH team has competed in the (CFA) Institute Research Challenge since 2012 and has won a second place previously in the 2019-2020 competition. 

The CFA Institute Research Challenge has four levels: local, sub-regional, regional, and global. The challenge consists of researching a publicly traded company, preparing a written report on that selected company, and then presenting their findings to judges in  ten minutes. The CSUDH team presented the case of Houlihan Lokey, an American multinational independent investment bank and financial services company, founded in 1972 in Los Angeles. 

The competition, which officially started in late October, gave the students the opportunity to meet the CEO and CFO of Houlihan Lokey in November which gave them the proper initiative to begin brainstorming and researching the company. 

For team leader Hajidatoo, this win was more than academic excellence, it was personal. “When I was in community college I didn’t take school as seriously as I should have but when I transfered to CSUDH I put my head down…  winning this competition only reinforced to me that God is with me and is guiding me,” he said. “Placing in second [place] in this competition is just the beginning of the blessings I have gotten,” he added. 

The team leader who graduated in December, when the team was still prepping for their presentation, spent hours every day going through the presentation slides and perfecting the script he wrote for the competition.

Dr. Rama Malladi, a professor at the CSUDH College of Business Administration and Public Policy and the advisor of the university’s finance club, was the team’s mentor. He knows all three students well and each of them have taken his finance classes previously. “ [I] could see their competitive nature during the course of their time at CSUDH,” he said, 

Malladi, who was also a former president of CFA Society Los Angeles and a mentor for the UCLA team, took on these leadership positions. According to Malladi, the biggest challenge he faces as an advisor for the CSUDH team is convincing students that they have a genuine shot at winning a finance competition against big-brand schools. 

“The team won because they put their heart and soul into the competition. The team captain, Aamir, went out of his way to pull the team together and motivate his teammates.. It is Aamir’s leadership, Roberto’s presentation skills, and Yihao (Ethan)’s quantitative skills that contributed to the team’s performance,” he said. 

Since the competition began till the day they had to present their work, team members Datoo, Penang and Morales, worked and invested approximately a total of 300 hours on this project. Morales, who is now the new president of the finance club, recalls the many long days the team would often have. “It was not easy, we would be working on [the project] for hours, we had to practice our presentation which was timed, so we would time ourselves over and over and if we went over time, we had to edit our script until it was perfect,” he said. 

For Morales, who is a full time student and also has a job, this competition was time consuming, and on some occasions took time away from his family time. “But it was worth it….[my parents] were very happy and very proud when I told them we had won.” He hopes that this win encourages current and future members of the finance club to enter competitions like this more often.

For the three-student team the only thing they wish would have been different is to have more time. “With only 3 people on our team while all other teams had 4 or 5 people, we were at a disadvantage,” Hajidatoo said. “I feel like if we had just a couple more days for the written report, a lot of things could have been done that would have gotten us better scores overall,” he added. 

For Hajidatoo, working with Morales and Peng was an amazing experience. “I couldn’t ask for a better team. Ethan is a genius when it comes to numbers and excel and he could tweak and understand the numbers better than anyone else. Roberto had great communication and never seemed to get tired even.. being able to bounce ideas off him was very helpful when it came to the final draft of our powerpoint presentation slides and making sure we didn’t skip over even the smallest of detail,” Hajidatoo said. 

For the future of finance students, Malladi hopes that access to new technology in the future will help train future students to enter and win more competitions like that of CFA. 

CSUDH alumnus, Doug Le Bon, most recent donation can transform this into a reality sooner than later. According to the CSUDH magazine, Le Bon donated $200,000 for technology in the new Innovation and Instruction building where the College of Business Administration & Public Policy (CBAPP)  is located. “We have received a historic donation from Mr. Doug Le Bon, CBAPP Alumni, to purchase Bloomberg Terminals,” Malladi said. Bloomberg Terminals is a self-paced e-learning system that provides an interactive introduction to financial markets and will provide CBAPP students like the three-student team, access to rich real-time financial data. “Our students will have access to this technology in the future and we hope to leverage this technology to train future students,” Malladi added. To view the CSUDH CFA Institute Research Challenge team presentation you can click here. The FA Institute Research Challenge Global Final will air on May 17th, 2021 during Alpha Summit GLOBAL. For more information click here.