A Stuart School of Business team won first place in the Chicago local round of the 2017 CFA Institute Research Challenge, an annual global competition that provides university students with hands-on mentoring and intensive training in financial analysis. Congratulations to the all-women team of finance students, including Anshu Ghodawat, Rui (Grace) Guo, Ermira Kastrati, Kiran Kurian, Bingjie (Jill) Yang, and to team advisor Michael Rybak, senior lecturer of finance. As part of the competition, the team was required to write an extensive report on McDonald’s Corporation, the Chicago CFA Chapter’s selected company for 2017. Twelve Chicago-area universities submitted reports, and the Stuart team’s score allowed them to advance to the presentation round where they competed against teams from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (second place), Northern Illinois University (third place), Loyola University Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, and Aurora University.
The Stuart team now moves on to compete in the Americas Regional competition in Seattle on April 6-7. The winners of that round will advance to the Global Final on April 28 in Prague, Czech Republic. Teams from Stuart have won the Chicago local round of the challenge five out of the last six years.