UNB Student Investment Fund raises bar with best performance yet
Author: Communications
Posted on Feb 2, 2010
Category: UNB Fredericton
University of New Brunswick Student Investment Fund (SIF) students ended 2009 with their best investment performance to date, closing at $2.4 million in funds under management.
The students were in Toronto last month, promoting the SIF program and their outstanding investment performance. They, along with SIF and UNB alumni, opened the Toronto Stock Exchange. The TMX Group, owner and operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange, has been a partner with the SIF program since 2006. In fact, the TMX Group Boardroom, housed within UNB Fredericton’s Faculty of Business Administration, is where all the SIF investment decisions are made.
The 2009 absolute performance for the Canadian balanced fund portfolio was 17.8 per cent, 91 basis points over the benchmark performance. This is the second year in a row that the students beat their benchmark by more than 50 basis points. They have had a total outperformance of 170 basis points over the past two years, the most volatile in the history of the Canadian capital markets since the 1950’s.
Since its inception more than 11 years ago, the SIF program has exceeded all expectations by many measures of success. The student-managed fund peaked during the summer of 2008 before the financial crisis. The students have recouped the underperformance of the last year strictly from investment returns. The risk of student investments is mitigated by their requirement to operate within the parameters of the New Brunswick Investment Management Corporation’s investment policy statement and with careful oversight at many levels.
About the SIF Program
In 1998, the New Brunswick Investment Management Corporation awarded UNB’s Faculty of Business Administration stewardship of over $1 million of pension assets under its management, which students in the SIF program would learn to invest.
The SIF program was the first student-managed fund in Atlantic Canada, one of a few in the country, and unique in North America with its embedded CFA Level One study program. Students from the SIF program have outperformed the industry average pass rate on the CFA Level One exam.
This international award winning program was the first Canadian university investment program to win the prestigious Redefining Investment Strategy Education (RISE) Competition in Dayton Ohio (2002, 2003, 2006), Dalhousie University Credit Risk Case Competition (2005) and the 2008 North American CFA Institute Investment Research Challenge; and second in the CFA Institute Global Investment Research Challenge in New York City where the students closed the Nasdaq exchange.
For more information on the SIF program, contact Glenn Cleland, director of the Centre for Financial Studies, Faculty of Business Administration, at cleland@unb.ca or 458-7510.
Contact:
Natalie Montgomery, Communication Officer (506) 453-4990