Behind the curtain: Insights from a stock pitch challenge

In March of my freshman year, Elana Kane ’28, Virginia Liang ’28, and I applied for Cornell’s Undergraduate Stock Pitch Challenge. We heard about the competition through a Cornell email. We were eager to apply and participate in the competition. Our team met through our professional business club at Cornell, the Mutual Investment Club of Cornell (MICC), where we had worked on stock pitches in the past. In May, we were thrilled to receive an email from the organizers of the Stock Pitch Challenge. We had been invited to compete virtually in September.

Setting our team up for success

On September 2, our team was ready and awaiting the email with the basket of stocks our team could choose to pitch. At 9:02 a.m., it arrived. The four stock options were Atlassian, Datadog, Coreweave, and Zscaler, all tech stocks with market capitalization hovering around $45 billion. After classes, our team sifted through annual reports, company websites, and investor relations pages, trying to choose a stock. Coreweave went public just six months prior, so we determined that the modeling would be too difficult without a sufficient financial history. Upon reviewing the financial statements, we observed that every company except Datadog reported a net loss. Based on this and our belief in Datadog’s business model, our team decided to pitch a long equity position for Datadog.

Research and the event introduction

The team quickly realized how little time we had to work on this pitch. We spent Tuesday night creating the slide deck and starting to build the financial models. We wanted to perform an intrinsic valuation and an extrinsic one, so we built a discounted cash flow (DCF) model and a comparable companies (comps) analysis. The team split up to work on the company overview, industry overview, investment catalysts and risks, and mitigants. By the following Tuesday, our presentation was complete, and we submitted the presentation.

On Thursday afternoon, the event opened with remarks from Lakshmi Bhojraj, Breazzano Family Executive Director of the Parker Center for Investment Research and founder of this event, followed by a research recruitment panel featuring Kristin Schweitzer of T. Rowe Price and Sabrina Basile of Fidelity Investments.

Presentation time

The next morning, our team presented. In our room, we were competing against eight teams from universities across the country, including Columbia, Claremont McKenna, Duke, and NYU. Each team had 10 minutes to present and a five-minute Q&A. Although we did not win the competition, we were all happy with our presentation and our learning experience. Our team received great feedback from the judge, and we plan to keep that in mind for future stock pitches. I highly recommend that undergraduates attend this competition.

About the author

Emma Jonisch ’28 is a mathematics major in the College of Arts and Sciences. On campus, Jonisch is an analyst in the Mutual Investments Club of Cornell and TAMID Group at Cornell.