Category: Investment funds

Dear GW Investment Institute Community Members,

2020 has been quite a year, full of challenges and full of opportunities for people to rise to the occasion. In the spring semester we moved our classes online after spring break and we have not been back in-person since. Spring 2021 will also be online. Now, with two approved vaccines we hope we’ll have a chance to back on campus, in-person, for the fall semester 2021.

Our GW students, faculty, and staff have been resourceful, resilient, and relentless in their efforts to keep things moving. Our GW healthcare professionals took on the challenge of navigating this covid pandemic, working to care for our GW and DC communities, we are grateful for their efforts.

At the GW Investment Institute (GWII) we remain committed to helping our students learn how to invest. Thanks to all for your support throughout this challenging time, it was needed more than ever. Below, please find a review of our GW Investment Institute activities from this past year.

Classes 

• 170+ undergraduate and graduate students/portfolio analysts enrolled in our classes.
• 11 classes taught including a new quant investing course. 
• 35+ industry professionals hosted as guest lecturers, they were kind enough to share their wisdom and experience with our students, thank you.

GW Investment Institute Awards to Students

• Continue to support our students through awards; this year we selected 10 Ramsey Scholars and awarded a total of $50,000. To learn more about the GW Ramsey Scholars Program please watch the video. 
• 2020 GW Ramsey Scholars:
  • Christophe de Montille, MBA/MIEP ’20
  • Jordi Halle, BBA ‘20
  • Charlie Horton, BBA‘21
  • Isabella Joseph, BBA ‘20
  • Skye Kussmann, MBA ‘20
  • Max Leo, BBA ’20
  • Joseph Pecora, BBA 20
  • Angela Pei, BS ‘20
  • Elizabeth Voss, MAcc ‘20
  • Dinesh Prabaharan, BBA ‘19
• Commenced a new GW Investment Institute Leadership award totaling $5,000.
• 2020 GWII Leadership Award recipients:
  • Nikolai Bottitta, BS ‘20
  • Suzanne Dannheim, BBA ‘20
  • Mary DePond, BBA ‘20
  • Xintong (Danielle) Li, BS ‘20
  • Jiajun (Winston) Zhong, BS’ 21

• $105,000 in total awards paid out to 15 students since the inception of the GW Investment Institute Ramsey Scholars Program and Leadership Awards.

GW Investment Institute Quarterly Report

• Thanks to the hard work of our students the GW Investment Institute Student Investment Funds continue to perform well, please see the September 30, 2020 quarterly report here.

International Student Competition 

We partnered with the GWSB Office of Undergraduate Programs to recruit and mentor a team of three GWSB undergraduate students: Meher Sahni, BBA ‘21, Paul Vernick, BBA ’20, and Jiajun (Winston) Zhong, BS ’21. Congratulations to our team for placing in the top 25 as semi-finalists of the annual McGill International Portfolio Challenge (MIPC), and a special shout out to Meher for receiving the Best Speaker Award for the entire competition.

PPE Factory

• Partnered with students, staff, and faculty across GW to help raise funds for the 3D printing, production, and distribution of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to the GW Hospital and other essential workers in the DMV area. Together we have raised over $14,000, thank you, and special thanks to GW Professor James Huckenpahler .

Communications

• Read our Blog to keep up-to-date about all things GW Investment Institute.
• Check out our new website.
• Sign up to join our mailing list.
• For GWII alumni -> please fill out the form, we would love to hear from you.

The scale of our activities and shared accomplishments are only possible with a team effort. Therefore, thank you to our GW Investment Institute Governing Board, Advisory Board, Alumni Advisors, guest lectures, fellows, interns, faculty, staff, our GWSB Dean – Anuj Mehrotra, and GW Development and Alumni Relations.   

GW Investment Institute Leadership Boards

GW Investment Institute Governing Board

• W. Russell (Russ) Ramsey, Chair, BBA ‘81

GW Investment Institute Advisory Board

• Mark Anfang | Portfolio Manager, Scopus Asset Management. BBA ‘02
• David Asper | GP Principal and Senior Partner Emeritus, Asper Group LLC, MS ‘72
• James Carruthers Jr. | Founder and  Portfolio Manager, Sophos Capital Management, MBA ‘80
• Samuel Eisner | Vice President, Investment Banking Division, Goldman Sachs, BBA ‘08
• Jared Golub | Founding Member and Partner, Marblegate Asset Management, BBA ‘00
• Mark Levine | Managing Director, Core Capital, MBA ‘78
• Rhoda Peritz | Head of Investment Business Strategy, Fiduciary Trust International, BBA ‘89
• Steven S. Ross | Managing Director, Financial Advisor, and Senior Portfolio Manager, The Ross Group, BBA ‘81

GW Investment Institute Faculty and Staff

• Rodney Lake, MBA ’03, Faculty, Director, Co-Chair
• Mattew Miller, MBA ’12, Adjunct Faculty – Finance
• Bojana Jankovic, MBA ’21, Program Manager 
• Elizabeth Voss, MAcc ’20, Research & Development Fellow
• Charlie Horton, BBA ’21, Equity Research Fellow
• Gaurav Gawankar, BA ‘20, Quant Fellow
• John Simmons, MBA ‘19, Equity Research Fellow

We have big plans for 2021, stay tuned and get involved!  Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

All the best,

Rodney Lake 

December 22, 2020

We hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Please follow the link to our GWII Quarterly Report September 2020. 

Have a great holiday season and happy new year to all.

If you wish you join one of our upcoming stock pitch days please use this rsvp link, thank you.

• GW Venture Capital SIF – December 7, 2020 at 12:45 pm EST
• GW Phillips SIF  – December 8, 2020 at 8:00 am EST
• GW Real Estate SIF – December 11, 2020 at 10:00 am EST
• GW Phillips SIF – December 12, 2020 at 10:00 am EST
• GW Ramsey SIF – December 13, 2020 at 10:00 am EST

Best regards,
Rodney

December 4, 2020

In mid September Nvidia (NVDA) announced that it was acquiring chip designer Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion, SoftBank paid $31 billion in 2016 (well done SoftBank). I think this deal is worth paying attention to – that’s not a unique view. The semiconductor sector is changing and those changes will likely impact other sectors. So what does this transaction mean? Only time will tell. For now, in my view, better understanding these companies and this sector is going to be generally useful. We’ll start with some basics today. 

Some basic differences between CPUs and GPUs:

CPU	GPU
Central Processing Unit	Graphics Processing Unit
Several cores	Many cores
Low latency	High throughput
Good for serial processing	Good for parallel processing
Can do a handful of operations at once	Can do thousands of operations at once

Applications for GPUs have traditionally been in gaming and that remains a significant part of the business. However, the use environments for GPUs have grown considerably, two areas of note are Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). ML and AI are being deployed across sectors, hence, a deeper understanding of their use cases is important.

Further down the field form GPUs are FPGAs, the recently reported potential AMD (AMD) – Xilinx (XLNX) deal is in part a demonstration of their relevance (more on this in another blog). What are FPGAs?

“Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) connected via programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be reprogrammed to desired application or functionality requirements after manufacturing. This feature distinguishes FPGAs from Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which are custom manufactured for specific design tasks. Although one-time programmable (OTP) FPGAs are available, the dominant types are SRAM based which can be reprogrammed as the design evolves.” (source: Xilinx.com)

Now back to the Nvidia (NVDA) – Arm deal, and it’s not a done deal, to be completed it will need regulatory approval across multiple jurisdictions. As of now that approval seems to be more likely than not, however, not certain. We’ll continue to pay attention to this transaction and generally to what’s happening in the semiconductor sector. These companies enable many other companies across industries to grow and respond to ever changing customer needs – considering autonomous driving as an example. Thank you for reading and have a great day.

Please join us this Thursday October 15th at 6:30 pm EDT for the GWII Show – Live with Rodney Lake.

All the best,

Rodney

October 14, 2020

At the GW Investment Institute (GWII) we work to be relentless, resilient, and reliable.

We think our relentless effort will continue to create opportunities for our students, staff, faculty, alumni, and friends.

The pace for semester is now accelerating and our expectations for our students are high. That said, we’re optimistic that we can properly teach and train our student portfolio managers/analysts to better position the GWII portfolios for new opportunities and to be more resilient in the face of uncertainty.

We are thankful for the many opportunities we have and for the many partnerships we have with our colleagues, alumni, and friends. We’ll continue to work to be more reliable for all of you, thank you.

And, importantly here in the U.S., September 11th is a day for reflection and remembrance, let’s resolve to be more relentless, resilient, and reliable.

Best regards,
Rodney

September 11, 2020

If you’re following the equity markets closely (there could be good reasons not to, by the way), you’ll likely have noticed today’s sharp retracement, the S&P 500 Index closed down -3.48% and the tech-centric NASDAQ Composite Index finished down -4.96% on the day. It’s been a few months since we saw such a move down, mostly the market has been moving higher since the calendar year lows in late March.

The market is a present value estimation of the discounted future value, and when the discount rate is historically low, i.e., low interest rates – we should expect higher present values, that’s math, it works. That said, has the market moved too far and too fast. Is it well ahead of the real economy? Are the current financial expectations exceeding what the real economy can deliver in the associated timeframe? The duration and impact of COVID-19 make these questions difficult to answer. Further, when will an effective vaccine be ready: soon? never? When will it be widely distributed: soon? never? These ranges are wide, making any type of modeling for future scenarios less than highly reliable.

Maybe the wisdom of the crowd will get this right, but maybe it does not have it sorted out quite yet. In the meantime, a balanced view of the way forward may serve us well. We’ll focus on the areas where the world is going, where demand is going, and where we can have a positive impact. Let’s use the current difficulties and uncertainties to strengthen. Happy Labor Day.

Best regards,
Rodney

September 3, 2020

The equity market, represented as an individual person wants to move higher, is optimistic and ready for whatever’s next. This outlook is powered in part by low interest rates and by a COVID-19 induced bifurcation of corporate winners and losers. Technology broadly represents some of the big winners, and old-line retail represents some of the losers – generally companies that had not and could not adapt to the new environment.

The economic impact of COVID-19 seems to be an accelerant for changes that were already underway. For example, old-line retail was not doing a fabulous job pre-COVID-19, the move to virtual everything just pushed them to the brink, some beyond – think Lord & Taylor, J.C. Penny, and Neiman Marcus. Meanwhile Amazon as no real surprise to anyone using Prime which has more than 100 million subscribers is leading the way in retail seemingly built for this type of environment, and some traditional brick-and-mortar, i.e., Walmart and Target are finding ways to adapt, for example Walmart’s Pickup and delivery especially for groceries.

So what can we glean from this? Some of the trends mentioned above were already in place pre-COVID-19, and what can we do to move forward? We can look to identify trends that may increase the probability of us making intelligent capital allocation decisions and we can move in that direction. As far as where the market is going, I have no idea.

Best regards,
Rodney

August 25, 2020

This week’s blog post is via video. Please watch and continue to follow us on our GWII youtube channel.

Best regards,
Rodney

August 18, 2020

“The sky’s the limit” – implies an indefinite yet seemingly limitless upward bound, well the opportunity set for the space commercialization industry is literally well beyond the sky. This is an important moment in the development of the space industry and D.C. and the DMV generally is home to some of the industry’s basic infrastructure for government, the private sector, and academics. Some examples include: NASA’s headquarters, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Wallops Flight Facility, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Airforce, U.S. Space Force, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and GW’s Space Policy Institute.

The landscape is changing rapidly and the frontier is out there. We are aiming to think of ways to participate in the evolution of the space industry. This past spring semester we had student teams in the GW Investment Institute associated venture course study and work on ideas that could be part of the new space industry. Here are their ideas:

• Lunachix – create the technology behind products that women need to ensure that they have freedom to decide how they treat their period – whether on Earth or in space.
• 4MY Partners – outer space asset management and services.
• Buzz Solutions – provide comprehensive master planning and project management solutions to investors and clients working on the mining of water in space.
• VantaBlack – lunar nuclear reactor using kilopower nuclear reactor technology.
• Scobo – empowering people analytics with big data and machine learning.

This fall semester we’ll be asking a new set of student teams to develop their own ideas for the space industry. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Best regards,
Rodney

August 11, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic races through the U.S. and other parts of the world, one important consideration is to think how we can help to stop, slow, and/or better manage the situation. There has been an unprecedented need for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and therefore shortages. If you would like to help in the D.C, Maryland, Virginia (DMV) area, please consider providing funding to help our GW Personal Protective Equipment Factory. This is a GW team led by Professor James Huckenpahler, an adjunct digital lab instructor in the Corcoran School of Art and Design. The team is using 3D printers to produce PPE for the GW Hospital, as well as donating PPE to organizations in DC, Prince George’s county in Maryland, and parts of northern Virginia, see GW Today article for further detail. GW Community Collaborates to Produce PPEs for Hospital Workers.

If you would like to make a gift to support this GW PPE Factory effort, please use this link and in the comment field type “for GW PPE Factory”. All funds raised will go directly to purchasing materials and equipment to produce additional PPE for GW and the DC area. Thank you, every dollar will help. 

Thanks for being part of our community, stay safe and be well.

 

Best regards,

Rodney