Research Challenge kicked off November 3rd
CFA Society Finland held the local Research Challenge competition kick-off on Tuesday 3 November. The Kick-off was streamed to students and faculty advisors participating virtually. CFA Institute is organizing the regional and global Research Challenge competitions completely virtually this year.
We have a record twelve teams participating from eight Finnish and Estonian Universities. Participating universities are Aalto University School of Business, University of Turku, University of Vaasa, Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics, Oulu University, Tartu University, Tallinn University of Technology and Lappeenranta University of Technology.
Research Challenge requires a lot of volunteer work annually in the roles of mentors, graders and judges. We have been thrilled to have already recruited all of the mentors for the twelve teams and are now looking for graders for the upcoming written report analyses. Thank you to our membership and stakeholders for stepping up to support this important work!
Tiina Smolander outlining the competition.
The Kick-off started by our Research Challenge team Antti Raappana, CFA , Tiiina Smolander, CFA and Hanna Savinainen, CFA first giving a short introduction of CFA Institute and CFA Society Finland followed by presenting Research Challenge competition, its’ schedule, presentation scoring, and helpful tips from past Finnish winners as well as how to be in touch with the company.
Visit the CFA Institute Research Challenge website: https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/societies/challenge
Read and follow competition rules very carefully
Register for the competition
Peruse educational materials selected specifically for participants
Watch videos of past presentations
View past reports from winning teams
Students MUST register on the CFA Institute website using the registration form provided by the local host.
The target company this year is Huhtamäki. Students get to analyze this Finnish company in the area of food packaging supplies and materials. Calle Loikkanen, Head of Investor Relations, presented a superb introduction to the company and its different market sectors, operating model, the important aspects of sustainability in food packaging and the company’s future towards 2030 goals. Afterwards the students had a chance to ask questions from Mr. Loikkanen. We had a terrific amount of questions from the participants that we had a chance to go through at the end of the presentation.
Calle Loikkanen presenting Huhtamäki.
Hanna Savinainen forwarding students’ questions to Calle.
Mikael Lehto from Refinitiv.
Refinitiv is the global sponsor of the CFA Institute Research Challenge and students get to use the “Refinitiv Workspace” platform to analyze the company during the competition. Mikael Lehto, CFA from Refinitiv introduced the Workspace system and Refinitiv as a company which has a very rich history as the first ever fintech company. The students have a vast amount of data at their disposal from Refinitiv and we are sure that the teams find this resource very useful. For future reference, there is also a great opportunity to carry out Certification Programs at https://training.refinitiv.com/.
A big thank you to photographer Pekka Lähteenmäki for making our live stream possible!
