The Merage School's Polaris Competition

Another amazing extra-curricular activity available at The Merage School is the Polaris Competition. The Polaris Competition is an investment competition where 5 or 6 teams of 4-6 students invest in companies who they believe are undervalued or will significantly grow in value over the course of a year. The catch is that there is real money on the table ($50,000 per team member). The money comes from the generous pockets of local success story, Chuck Martin; a individual who has been successful in running companies and investment funds. Chuck founded this competition as a means to teach students on how to value companies and identify solid companies. His reasoning, and correctly so, is that this skill is applicable in many areas beyond just investing. With teams investing between $200,000 - $300,000 each, Chuck is definitely putting his money on the line.
The nice aspect of this competition is that successful teams get to benefit from gains of their hard work! Provided a team beats the market average, they can get 50% of their gains up to a cap determined by how they place in the competition. The competition starts in June and runs for a year, so any winnings is a nice bonus for the end of your program that can be applied to all that student debt. Now it is not all upside for the student teams. Each member must put up a $200 bond that will be forfeit if the team loses money.
The competition is pretty exclusive. Only 5 or 6 teams are allowed to participate out of all the full-time, fully-employed, health-care and Executive MBAs. I was lucky enough to latch on to a very talented team who got selected to participate. Going through the selection process, it was clear that we were not the most experienced in investing, but I think we demonstrated our teams diversity and that we were enjoying the learning experience. That was enough to get us in. I can't talk about our stocks because its triple secret, but I can say that after one week we are up about 4.5% (wouldn't it be nice to keep that up every week).
This has been tough, but excellent experience. An immense amount of work goes into identifying and evaluating potential companies. Since I have little desire to be a day-trader, I am in the competition to understand how to identify good companies and companies that have issues despite the appearance of being solid. The learning curve has been steep, but after a three months of working on this the knowledge gain has been impressive. Just another great feature of The Merage School and how it is trying to significantly improve the quality of the program and its students.