A team of Orfalea College of Business students won the Northern California Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Investment Research Challenge sponsored by the CFA Society of San Francisco.

The students competed against teams from 12 Bay Area universities, including graduate and undergraduate programs from Santa Clara, St. Mary’s, San Jose State, Hult International Business School and UC Santa Cruz. The competitors were charged with analyzing and making buy/sell/hold recommendations for Salesforce.com, a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco. A panel of industry professionals and CFA charter holders judged the presentations.

Finance students Benjamin Consoli of Redwood City, Adam Pasco of Burbank, Kian Ramezani of San Luis Obispo, Coby Snyder and economics major Mason McCloskey of San Luis Obispo represented Cal Poly. Finance Professor Cyrus Ramezani and finance alumnus Scott B. Kirk served as team advisors.

Cal Poly alumni David Dudek, Aaron Hay, Dario Buechi, Joey Guerra, Stephen Marotto, Alyssa Gustafson and Paul Boortz supported the team by critiquing its presentation prior to the final competition and made time to cheer on Cal Poly.

The Cal Poly team will advance to the Americas Regional competition in Boston on March 19 and 20, where they will compete against 55 universities from the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

More than 5,000 students representing over 1,000 teams from universities in more than 80 countries have been a part of the 2018 competition. It provides university students with hands-on mentoring and intensive training in financial analysis. Students work in teams to research and analyze a publicly traded company. Each team writes a research report on their assigned company with a buy, sell or hold recommendation and then presents and defends their analysis to a panel of industry professionals.

For more information about the competition, visit http://cfa-sf.org/page/EventsIRC.