Students helm investment group

By Michelle Jin     3/12/09 7:00pm

In these times of economic crisis, the safest place to invest your money may be the newly-formed Owl Investment Group. Founded by Martel college sophomore Chris Kopczynski, the Owl Investment Group seeks to give Rice students hands-on experience in investing and provides financial news to students.

The group consists of three parts: Owl Capital Management, Owl Investment Society and "Owl Financial Journal."

Owl Capital Management is a private partnership of 20 undergraduate students who pool together money and collectively manage it through buying stocks.

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As private partnership, each member of Owl Capital Management is a shareholder in the company and thus also a partner. Because it is not an official Rice club, it has almost total financial freedom.

Each member buys into the partnership by purchasing $100 of shares. The group meets to discuss how they will invest the money, and a majority of the shareholders have to agree on each investment decision.

The shareholders are divided into smaller groups in charge of tracking different sectors of the market, Kopczynski said. The smaller groups report their findings to all the shareholders, who vote on how the money is invested. In total, the group has around 80 to 90 shares and manages close to $10,000.

"What we're doing is pretty much acting as a hedge fund to invest the money," Kopczynski said.

At the beginning of the fall semester, the organization's officers selected 20 students from the approximately 40 students who applied to join the group. One key factor in the selection process was a student's experience in investing, said Kopczynski, who said he has been investing since eighth grade.

"We look for people who go into the meetings knowing the lingo and how things work," Kopczynski said. "People with willingness to give their time and effort to the club. We also look for diversity of actors. We love to get people who have international exposure here, because some of the investments we are looking at are outside the United States and are international investments."

For those students who did not have enough investment experience to join Owl Capital Management, Kopczynski is forming the Owl Investment Society. Kopczynski said he hopes it will provide interested students with the background they need to eventually join the Owl Capital Management group.

Despite economic troubles, Owl Capital Management has seen positive returns since it started last year.

"We've done really well with managing our money," Kopczynski said. "Last semester, we outperformed the market by 27 percent. We were up 14 percent while the market was down 13 percent."

In order to share the group's financial findings, Kopczynski co-founded the "Owl Financial Journal" with Martel freshman Pedro Silva this year. The biweekly journal covers topics related to the stock market, personal finance and current events in the financial sector, and will be coming out next week.

The journal is sent to over 30 colleges in the US. Currently, the publication is only available online at www.owlinvesting.com.

A staff of 20 students, many of whom are part of Owl Capital Management, currently manages the journal.

The group is working to build partnerships with other schools in the nation, such as Emory University and Harvard University, to further develop the journal.

"I feel like we have a chance to be the premier undergraduate-run financial journal out there," Kopczynski said. "There is one other [financial journal] called the 'Bulls and Bears' which is run by Carnegie Mellon University. They send it out to about 60 schools. We were getting it, and we were not impressed by the quality of the articles or the journal at all. We thought we could do this a lot better.

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