TAR UC’s champion team: (from left, top row) Kieran Lim Shen Jie, Ng Poh Yi and Tan Jen Zhong, (from left, bottom row) Cheah Zhi Yu and Peggie Wong Pei Chi.
The local champion team, TAR UC, as depicted in the poster by CFA Society Malaysia.
TAR UC students have once again put TAR UC in the limelight by winning the Champion prize in the highly-regarded CFA Institute Research Challenge 2021/2022 local finals held on 19 February 2022. Five TAR UC’s Bachelor of Finance and Investment (Hons) students namely Ng Poh Yi, Cheah Zhi Yu, Tan Jen Zhong, Peggie Wong Pei Chi and Kieran Lim Shen Jie clinched the local Champion prize after going through the grueling challenge. A total of 29 teams from 18 universities participated in this year’s competition and only 5 teams were selected to the local finals.
The CFA Institute Research Challenge is an annual global competition held for university-sponsored teams. Participating teams are required to research a designated publicly traded company, prepare a written report on that selected company and then present their findings to a panel of judges comprising CFA charterholders who are investment professionals. The competition has four levels: local, sub-regional, regional and global. The winning university teams from each local competition advance to the sub-regional competition. The winning teams from each sub-regional competition advance to the regional competition. Regional winners advance to the Global Final, where one team emerges as the global champion.
Ng Poh Yi, the leader of the team, waxed lyrical about the competition. “I have always wanted to improve myself. Participating in a competition can help me achieve this objective. I heard that the CFA Institute Research Challenge is very challenging and that motivated me to take part in it to prove to myself that I could do it and also to evaluate myself in terms of my knowledge and skills against students from other universities,” she said.
She added: “It helps that my team members are all as motivated as I am. We frequently had brainstorming sessions and kept encouraging each other not to give up as the competition was very demanding. Each team member played their role well and produced high quality work.”
Poh Yi was particularly effusive in her appreciation for their advisor and Senior Lecturer, Mr Wang Ah Yong. “He has been our pillar of strength and has inspired us greatly. He kept reminding us to be confident and have the mindset that we were good enough to win and never feel inferior in terms of knowledge and skills when competing with others. He also guided us in our presentation and Q&A sessions,” she enthused.
She spoke about the challenges the team faced during the competition. “The competition required us to do a detailed research of a company and perform a valuation of the company. This required in-depth equity analysis skills and knowledge. So it was a steep learning curve for us to try to apply what we had learnt in classes. The main challenge was to apply real-world practical knowledge that we lacked. To overcome that, we spent time reading real market analyst reports and listening to podcasts. We also distributed the tasks to each team member according to our strengths in different areas,” she said.
Finally, Poh Yi said that the next step now would be to focus on the sub-regional competition which will be held from March 2022. “Our team will continue to have multiple trainings per week to further strengthen our presentation skills,” she added.
The team will be one of the top two teams representing Malaysia in the Asia-Pacific Sub-Regional Finals.
