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CFASS Partners with Sacramento Business Review for Market Forecast Event

A crowd of nearly 250 CFASS members and local business leaders gathered at the CSUS Alumni Center on January 14, 2010, for this year’s Market Forecast Event. CFASS partnered with the Sacramento Business Review (SBR), a collaboration between the so-ciety and the CSUS College of Business Administration, to present global and local economic and market forecasts.

CFASS President, Candace Ronan, led off the event by introducing this year’s key-note speaker, Peter Tannenbaum, a senior equity trading strategist at J.P. Morgan in New York. Tannenbaum argued that a relatively large amount of cash on the sidelines will support equity-market valuations in 2010. He presented a 14% an-nual return on the S&P 500 as his base case.

The event then shifted gears to cover the forecasts for the Sacramento Region. CFASS board member, Brian Leu, CFA, started the local portion by presenting the SBR’s less-than-sanguine regional employment outlook. CB Richard Ellis’ Marc Ross, CFA, followed by painting a fairly grim picture of the local real estate mar-kets. CFASS Treasurer, Jonathan Lederer, CFA, then discussed how problem real estate loans will continue to pressure bank balance sheets and constrain lending in the Sacramento region. Finally, our President’s Council Representative, Jason Bell, CFA, laid out his capital-markets forecasts, which entailed an optimistic first half, followed by a mid-year correction, but a positive close to 2010.

After listening to the bevy of less-than-rosy forecasts, the near-capacity crowd was fortunately treated to free cocktails at the event’s conclusion. Many CFASS members took advantage of the opportunity to network with colleagues and local business leaders, who were guests of the business school.

Sanjay Varshney, CFA, dean of the CSUS College of Business Administration and CFASS Advisory Board member, was very pleased with the inaugural SBR forecast event. "It was very empowering to observe how the local business com-munity benefitted from the partnership of intellectual capital between the CFA society and the business school."

Local Students Compete in Inaugural Regional CFA Investment Research Challenge

On January 15, a team of four MBA students from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management traveled to Las Vegas to partici-pate in the inaugural Western Regional competition, as part of the 4th Annual Global Investment Research Challenge hosted by the CFA Institute. The team was selected by CFASS in partnership with UC Davis to represent Sacramento in competing against teams from ten other top west coast business schools, including USC, UC-Irvine, Wharton-West, UNLV, University of Arizona and UCSD. Each student team was responsible for researching a stock and presenting their investment recommendation to a panel of distinguished investors. The local UCD team conducted their research, including a visit with the company, on Roseville-based SureWest Communications (NASDAQ: SURW), and, to provide guidance, the team of students was assigned a faculty advisor from UCD and an industry mentor.

"The competition offers the students the unique opportunity to apply theory learned in the classroom to a hands-on equity re-search report that is ultimately presented before real-world portfo-lio managers," said industry mentor Brian Leu, an Investment Of-ficer at CalPERS. "It’s a fantastic learning experience and net-working opportunity."

The Western regional competition was ultimately won by the team from Wharton-West, who will go on to New York to compete in the Americas regional and, if successful, on to Hong Kong for the global finals held on April 17, 2010.

For more information, please see link
http://www.cfainstitute.org/society/challenge/index.html.

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