My name is Matt Goff and I am a rising junior majoring in accounting and minoring in finance here at HPU. This summer I am interning at Scott & Stringfellow in Greensboro, NC. For those of you who do not know, S&S is a wholly-owned nonbank subsidiary of BB&T Corporation. According to the company: “The firm has operated as a full-service regional brokerage and investment banking firm serving individual, institutional, corporate, and municipal clients. Their Capital Markets division allows them to offer their retail client base a broad range of equity and fixed income research, new issue equity and debt products originated by their investment bankers, and secondary liquidity through their equity and fixed income trading desks. In addition, BB&T Capital Markets assists their corporate clients with their investment banking needs; including public and private equity and debt offerings, merger and acquisition advice, institutional sales and trading, portfolio evaluations, and corporate banking products.”
I will be working with one of Scott & Stringfellow’s top ten financial advisors performing equity research and portfolio management functions. My experience with the Floyd T. Craven Investment Club and the outstanding preparation provided by my accounting and finance professors has prepared me well for this internship. Among many things, I believe this internship will introduce me to managing behavioral finance aspects of clients in a highly volatile market.
Yesterday, started my second week at S&S and I have plenty of projects and tasks to gain valuable experience on. For one of my projects, I have been tasked with analyzing several different Mutual Funds, ETFs, and Lifetime Portfolio funds on their radar to determine which ones, based on the fund’s allocations, match their macroeconomic views for the future. Among many things, here are a couple things to keep in mind. Key ratios to look at are Jensen’s Alpha, the Sharp Ratio and the Treynor Ratio. These are statistical ratios to measure risk and volatility within the fund. Another metric to pay attention to is to find an appropriate benchmark to compare the funds performance. If it’s a domestic equity fund, the S&P 500 is a good choice, and if it is a bond fund Barclay’s Aggregate Index is good too. When analyzing these funds, you also want to know the management’s track record and if the funds have switched managers recently. I hope that gives you a top level understanding of what this entails.
Well, that leaves me until next time where I’ll talk about other projects I’m working on here at Scott & Stringfellow!
Warmest regards,
Matt Goff