KU Presents to Buffett, and the CFA Level 1 Exam

KU Students Present to Warren Buffett

Friday afternoon a group of about 100 KU Business students had the opportunity to join Warren Buffett for a question and answer session in Omaha. The 90-minute Q&A went very well, with Buffett in fine form, including some interesting discussion of Ben Graham's life and development as an investor that I had never heard before.

Two groups of students from Mark Hirschey's Security Analysis class then presented two investment ideas for Buffett. The ideas were the result of a semester of research and competition from the 45 students in Hirschey's class.

In the end, the students presented two investment ideas, Schwan's Food and Pella Windows. While the students produced lengthy reports explaining the investment thesis behind each company, they chose to present them in creative and compelling humorous skits. Buffett loved the skits and at the end told the students that their presentations will be the standard by which he measures future presentations and that:

"I will definitely follow through on these ideas,"” Buffett said after the meeting... "I will follow up (and read the reports), and I will follow that up with a personal phone call to both companies — especially (Schwan)."

CFA in Chicago

I also joined five other KU Finance students, and about 900 of our closest friends in taking the first level of the CFA exam on Saturday.

As I expected, the test was long (six hours) and tough (only 34% of all test takers pass the test). You know a test is really a tough test when out of 900 normally cocky finance students and practitioners, you don't hear anyone talking about how easy it was or how they feel like they really nailed it.

Goood luck to everyone who took the test on Saturday, we have six weeks until we get results.

Timothy Burger
timothyb(at)timothyburger.com