In the News
Jenny Banner, Finance Department Advisory Council member, and CEO of the Schaad Companies, has established the John M. Wachowicz, Jr. Finance Excellence Endowment. Earnings will be used to support the activities of the Financial Management Association or the Volunteers on Wall Street Program. Jenny recently received the "Alumni Service Award" which recognizes exceptional service or long-term continuing service and leadership to the University of Tennessee. It acknowledges those who have given significant amounts of time, talent or resources to their alma mater.
Pictured: Lien Nguyen, John Wachowicz, Jenny Banner and James Schaad at the awards dinner.
CBA Professor of Banking and Finance Ray DeGennaro's very interesting research about stock sales was featured as the cover story of the Fall 2009 print version of the Quest Research Magazine, in an article by Bill Dockery. (Excerpted below:)
DeGennaro’s Research Agenda
DeGennaro does not limit his research interests to analyzing the immediacy of volatile markets; his research agenda extends to projects that explore the social dimensions of capital investment.
DeGennaro thinks the risk premium would be an indicator of the confidence—or lack thereof— that investors have in the health of the market or of a particular institution. “The risk premium can be an indication of what investors think the chances are that an institution handling the trade will fail,” he says. “What are the chances of a disruption of payments? Am I going to get paid on time if the institution is gone or swamped with transactions?”
He expects that an examination of the financial
transactions of the 2008 period would reveal the
existence of the risk premium as an unarticulated
cost of the market’s volatility. “If we had been watching the uptick in the risk
premium in the summer of 2008, it might have
alerted us early on that investors thought the markets were fragile.”
Welcome
The Finance Department is pleased to welcome Andy Puckett as Assistant Professor. Dr. Puckett comes to us from the University of Missouri, where he taught investments to both undergraduate and graduate students. His primary research interests are institutional investing, analysts, and market microstructure. He has published in the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of the American Taxation Association, and his research has been presented at the American Finance Association, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Financial Management Association, and the Singapore International Conference.
Congratulations
Larry Fauver has been promoted to Associate Professor. Dr. Fauver has published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Financial Management, and other finance journals. His research has also been featured in Forbes. He teaches the introductory international finance courses in UT’s undergraduate and graduate curriculum.
Honors
The CBA Spring Honors Banquet was held on April 21, 2009, and several of our faculty, graduate students and staff received awards.
Congratulations go to Jim Wansley, who won the 2009 Richard D. Sanders Award for Leadership in Executive Education, and also to Kayti Schumann, who won the 2009 CBA Graduate Teaching Award. Jeannie Goodman and Cathy Price won the CBA Staff award for superior customer service. Larry Fauver was a finalist for both the Outstanding Teaching Award and the Outstanding Researcher award and Tracie Woidtke was a finalist for the Outstanding Teaching, Research and Service award. Well done, everybody!
Jim Wansley receives the 2009 Richard D. Sanders Award for Leadership in Executive Education
James Wansley, Jeannie Goodman, Cathy Price, and Kayti Shcumann
Investment Learning Center (ILC)
The Investment Learning Center is up and running in the new Haslam Building. Laura Seery Cole has been hired as director of the ILC (and lecturer of the Department of Finance.) The Center provides a dedicated space for the Haslam and LaPorte Torch Fund managers to meet and team rooms for Torch and other investment groups. The ILC also provides Bloomberg Certification programs and sophisticated stock ticker technology to promote student competencies in applying and interpreting financial market data. Funded entirely through the generosity of private donations, the ILC occupies a very prominent, highly visible space in the corridor of the Haslam Business Building. The glass windows looking into the ILC have mulitple nose and forehead prints from the interested passersby!
In addition to the MBA level Torch Funds, two new investment challenges, led by Finance faculty, are available for undergraduates and also make use of the state-of-the-art technology in the ILC.
CFA Global Investment Research Challenge
Finance students interact with investment professionals and top firms while getting real-world experience and mentoring. This challenge converges students, investment industry professionals, publicly traded companies, and corporate sponsors together for a real world competition.
The CFA Society of Louisville hosts this challenge, and other participating schools include Louisville, Bellarmine, IU Southeast, and Butler University. The universities assemble teams of five students who work directly with a company to research and prepare a company analysis. The teams’ final presentations are locally evaluated by high-profile panels of heads of research, portfolio managers, and chief investment officers from the world’s top firms. Winners from the local competition then advance to regional competitions in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, and then to the global finale.
Dr. Alvaro G. Taboada, CFA, is the faculty advisor and can be contacted at ataboada@utk.edu.
NYMEX Commodities Challenge
This is a two-phase undergraduate competition which begins with electronic trading. Each team is allocated mock $100,000 trading allowances in the first round to buy and sell full-size crude oil and natural gas futures contracts. Teams are required to make a minimum of three trades per day using a CQG Trading Platform.
UT students compete against teams from colleges and universities including Brown, Columbia, George Washington, Penn State, Rice, Syracuse, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale.
At the end of the first phase, the top teams qualify for an individual “Open Outcry” competition in New York City. The students are then judged by NYMEX traders on their ability to fill orders and utilize proper trading techniques. Open outcry is a fading practice. Participating has a historical importance and symbolizes Wall Street, and is valuable since it can teach students a lot about the way the market moves.
Dr. Phillip Daves is the faculty advisor and can be contacted at pdaves@utk.edu.
Woidtke Goes International
Dr. Tracie Woidtke will be on sabbatical from UT this fall semester and will be using the sabbatical to teach in Italy at the
Consortium of Universities for International Studies (CIMBA) in Treviso, Italy. She will teach two finance courses to the American students who come from the 33 partner universities in the consortium. For more information about CIMBA, go here. Dr. Woitke hopes to bring back enthusiasm and information that will help encourage our students to go global during their university experience.