You wouldn’t know it from her stylish print dress, but fashion is not a passion for Katie Merrill.
Nevertheless, there the OSU senior was Friday morning, giving an analysis of high-end design company Michael Kors to about four dozen of her peers in an Austin Hall classroom during a joint meeting of the Oregon State Investment Group and the group’s counterparts from the University of Oregon.
“It was kind of nerve-wracking with everyone here,” Merrill said after her 30-minute presentation, during which she recommended both schools’ clubs invest in Michael Kors. “But it’s always fun to present to the combined group. The questions are different.”
Merrill, double-majoring in finance and industrial engineering, said she spent a month preparing for Friday, her fourth such presentation overall.
Her talk, delivered to a dressed-for-success audience, followed a presentation by Oregon’s Matthew Eden and Michael Lyford, who had analyzed Infoblox, a company that deals in IT management tools.
The student investors had no shortage of follow-up questions for the presenters, many of them pointed.
Afterward one of the questioners, the UO’s Graham Simon, a math major, explained: “Someone has to dig into the numbers and find the pressure points.”
The presentations by Lyford, Eden and Merrill came after other club members had given overviews of each group’s three portfolios: Tall Firs, Svigals and DADCO for the University of Oregon, and Large-Cap, DADCO and Russell 2000 Synthetic for Oregon State; DADCO, which stands for the D.A. Davidson Student Investment Competition, features 20 schools throughout the West, each of which is given $50,000 each September to manage. OSIG is the defending champion, having last year turned that $50K into $69,014.35.
The Large-Cap portfolio, which originated with $1 million in funds from the OSU Foundation in October 2008, is now worth $1,944,561.86.
The Oregon State Investment Group meets every Friday from 8 to 10 a.m.