By Anil Sharma
Jaipur, Sep 27 (IANS) Students at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, in Rajasthan, have started an investment fund to learn the intricacies of investing in stock markets.
Questus-India Investment Fund is first of a kind student-run investment fund managed by members of Wall Street Club-BITS, a student group which aims to help students learn the art of investment through direct application of their skills in the real time market.
The student fund managers through extensive fundamental and technical analysis manage the corpus of nearly Rs.110,000 pooled in by current students and BITS alumni from Wall Street and Dalal Street.
“It is really a big challenge and opportunity to manage this considerable amount. Last semester between January to May, 2007 the club members had initiated and managed a pilot investment fund with a corpus of Rs.30,000 and got a whopping 30 percent returns in the highly volatile Indian markets”, Abhishek Humbad, a third-year student of engineering and founder of Wall Street Club, told IANS.
The team at Questus comprises 33 analysts who have been given six sectors and a sector head with four sector analysts for every sector. Each sector has 10 companies each to analyse and give their recommendations.
A core team of three board members and six sector heads take the final decision on which stock to buy, how much to buy, when to buy and when to exit. The profits made are further re-invested in the fund. The NSE Nifty is the base index for Questus and it invests only in equity in top-rated companies, said Humbad.
“The final goal is to apply the investment concepts learnt in textbooks to the real time markets and understand its intricacies like markets sentiments, global effects, political turbulence etc”, he added.
Wall Street Club is an investment club founded eight months back at BITS with a view to make the students “money-aware”, said Humbad.
“The idea of the Wall Street Club is to enrich, empower and explore”, said N.V. Muralidhar Rao, dean student welfare division and the professor advisor.
“The club runs a series of lectures by the alumni called ‘Stockopedia’. The lectures are delivered through live streaming and cover the concepts of stock market in a bottom up approach. Basics of building a profitable portfolio will be imparted to all members. After the enrichment course is over, the Empowerment phase comes in through Questus- the first and only student mutual fund. This is where students have fun, learn and earn. Other plans on the sidelines include attracting investment bankers to BITS for placements and setting up an investment lab like foreign B-schools,” said Dr Rao.