The focus of this week’s column in the Trivia Tuesday series, in which we cover information about the unique program elements that differentiate the leading MBA programs from their peers, is the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Today we’re sharing a passage from the Clear Admit School Guide to McCombs that describes the school’s AIM Investment Center.
“The AIM Investment Center, created through an endowment provided by AIM Management Group co-founders Gary Crum and Bob Graham, provides students with the resources to gain an experiential perspective on investment management. The center’s EDS Financial Trading and Technology Center, founded by former dean George Gau and sponsored by technology services company Electronic Data Systems, includes an accurate recreation of a Wall Street trading room complete with real-time stock quotes and cutting-edge telecommunications systems – a resource which enables finance professors to incorporate the latest technology into their courses. The center also provides office space for the members of the MBA Investment Fund to manage their three multi-million-dollar investment portfolios.
Run out of the AIM Investment Center, the MBA Investment Fund was the first-ever legally constituted, student-managed private investment fund to be established at any business school. The limited liability company, founded in 1994 by George W. Gau, has a clientele of over 60 investors and, as of September 2008, had increased its initial $1.6 million investment to over $13 million. The fund provides three investment products: an endowment portfolio, a growth-oriented equity portfolio and a value-oriented equity portfolio. The growth- and value-oriented portfolios are geared toward benefiting individual and corporate clients, while the endowment portfolio focuses on supporting the AIM Investment Center itself.
Because of natural student turnover, the AIM Investment Center has appointed two overseers, Dr. Laura Starks and Sanford Leeds, to provide continuity within the fund’s management team. Leeds and Starks choose no more than 20 students to join the MBA Investment Fund each year based on a competitive application process. These students become fund managers who take charge of most activity within the fund’s three portfolios, working in conjunction with investment counselors to determine the best courses of action for each portfolio.
The student managers work under the guidance of five investment counselors, each of whom specializes in a different area of expertise, such as Telecommunications, Industrials or Healthcare. These counselors, who hail from leading companies such as Morgan Stanley and AIM Investments, are chosen by the fund board and do not receive compensation for their participation with the company. Though students take an active role in shaping the financial structure of each portfolio, counselors can veto any student investment suggestion they feel will harm or hamper the overall profitability of the portfolio in question. In addition to consulting with Starks, Leeds and the five investment counselors, students are also required to discuss their decisions with an advisory board made up of finance department faculty members and leaders within the investment management industry.”
To read more about the AIM Investment Center, as well as to obtain in-depth program and curriculum information, be sure to check out the Clear Admit School Guide to McCombs! All 21 Clear Admit School Guides are available for immediate purchase and download on the Clear Admit shop.
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Read the full article: Trivia Tuesday: McCombs’s AIM Investment Center