KPMG Investment Challenge: Gold Rush has mined some winners

Bermuda High School for Girls have three teams in the top half of the table in this year’s KPMG Senior School Investment challenge.

They are all in good position to challenge for the top prize.

This year’s BHS teams are Cash Cows, The Undecideds and Gold Rush.

Gold Rush remains in second place behind Bermuda Institute’s Profitbulls. There wasn’t much change between the top two spots as the Profitbulls portfolio decreased by $0.50 while Gold Rush saw the value of its holdings decrease by $1. Gold Rush currently has $54,393.90.

All 16 teams in the KPMG Investment Challenge started with a mythical $50,000 to purchase stocks.

Brianna Mendes, Megan Sutcliffe, Jessica Anfossi, Hailey Quig and Georgia Bower are the brain trust of Gold Rush.  

Brianna, team captain, makes sure her teammates are monitoring their stocks regularly.

Asked how the challenge has been going so far, Hailey said: “It’s pretty good. We have taken a few hits but I think we’re coming back.

“They weren’t bad hits, they just weren’t good hits.

“It’s all a learning experience. We had no experience at all coming into it. As we go along, we pick things up.”

Megan added: “At first we didn’t know what stock betas were. (A stock beta is a measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of a security or a portfolio in comparison to the market as a whole). Now, we have a better knowledge of what we need.”

Instead of choosing stocks fort the whole group, each student has a stock and is required to monitor it on a regular basis.

Georgina follows KeyTech as the group’s Bermuda stock.

“We were trying to get varying types so I thought it would be good,” she said. 

Hailey’s stock is Venaxis Inc.

“It’s a penny stock. It’s high risk.

“I want it to get really high. The trouble with that is it can do really well or really badly.

“We had some more stable stocks to balance out our portfolio.”

Brianna said at the beginning of the challenge, there were ten members of the team and each person was given $5,000 to invest.

Jessica said she initially chose Macy’s and it did really well.

“We tried to look at things like Macy’s near Christmas because people were shopping. Someone invested in BP Oil around the same time.

“We decided to look at what people do at this time of year.”

Brianna added: “We tried to keep a variety so that we don’t have just commercial stocks.”

The team chose one stock on the Hong Kong Exchange and it ended up being very confusing trying to figure out if the stock was in Hong Kong money or American money.

As far as monitoring their stocks, Megan said: “When I go on Google Finance, I’ll see the stocks go up and then I’ll see the day before it went down.

“It’s kind of scary that they move around so much.”

Speaking on what she’s learning, Brianna said: “For me, what I learned isn’t necessarily about stocks but patience.

“I would consistently be on people’s backs telling them to monitor the stocks.

“Some people do this differently than I do.”

Jessica said there is competition amongst the team to see whose stock is doing the best.

Megan called it “healthy competition”.

The other BHS teams are also doing well. Cash Cows are sixth overall with a portfolio of $52,409.97 while The Undecideds are eighth with $51,647.00 in their portfolio.

Behind Gold Rush in the standings is DT1 Investors from CedarBridge Academy with a portfolio value of  $53,457.10.

The portfolios of all teams are highly concentrated in the United States, Britain, Bermuda and China with minor positions held in various other countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and Canada. 

All teams are required to hold at least one Bermudian company traded on the BSX in their portfolios, with most teams opting for well known names such as Bank of NT Butterfield, KeyTech Limited, and Ascendant Group Limited.

The teams have chosen to invest primarily in actively traded US common stocks with other minimal investments in ADRs (American Depository Receipts), MLPs (Master Limited Partnerships), and Open-ended Funds.

 Across industry sectors, the portfolios are very well diversified with the Communications, Consumers- Cyclical, Consumer- Noncyclical, and Financial sectors leading the way.