Cal Poly Finance Team Advances in Global Competition with Analysis of PayPal Stock Outlook – Cal Poly News

Business Students won local, regional titles in CFA Investment Research Challenge and
advanced to the highest level of any team from the university’s Orfalea College of Business
 

SAN LUIS OBISPO — A detailed analysis of PayPal’s stock outlook, with a recommendation to sell, helped a team of Cal Poly finance students surpass hundreds of others recently in the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute Research Challenge.
 
Competing against over 900 schools from North, Central and South America, the Cal Poly team was one of just 17 that advanced to the Americas’ semifinals held this month, having won the local and subregional stages. The global competition includes over 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students from universities in more than 91 countries. Students are tested on their analytical, valuation, report writing and presentation skills.

For the competition, the students were assigned to perform an analysis of PayPal, a San Jose-based company providing financial transaction processing services. The team spent five months compiling a report — which included information about PayPal’s business model, an industry overview, risks and more — before making a recommendation to sell PayPal stock, projecting its value would decrease by over 12 percent within a year.
 
“Developing this report may be one of the hardest and most extensive projects we have ever worked on,” said team captain Alexandra Joelson of San Diego. “We were confined to 10 core pages and 10…