The CFA Society of Milwaukee announced today the Wisconsin School of Business team from UW-Madison has won the local competition of the CFA Institute Research Challenge and now advances to the Americas Regional Challenge next month in Denver, CO.

Members of the winning include Sean Bidzinski, Matt Hsu, Sam Jacobsen, Jake Strole, and Chris Piel – all of whom are currently participating in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Security Analysis Program. Drew Justman, CFA, an equity analyst at Madison Investment Advisors, served as Mentor to the team. Brian Hellmer, CFA, who is Director of the Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, served as the group’s faculty advisor. The panel of judges included Brian Andrew, CFA of Cleary Gull, Bill McGinnis, CFA of Exponential Careers, and Peter Merkel, CFA of Magis Management.

The CFA Society of Milwaukee competition was the first round of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. All of the student teams in this round of the competition presented a detailed analysis and investment recommendation on Associated Banc-Corp. The presentations at the Milwaukee finals were the result of three months of research, interviews with company management, discussions with competitors and dealers and presentation preparation.

The students from UW-Madison will now travel to the Americas Regional challenge to be held on March 18-19 in Denver, Colorado where they will compete with student teams from Canada, the United States, and South America. The winners of the four regional challenges (Americas, New York, Europe, and Asia Pacific) will advance to compete in the global finals on April 25, 2014 in Singapore.

“I’m extremely proud of this talented and hard working group of students” said Brian Hellmer, who serves as Director of the Hawk Center after a long career of managing institutional equity portfolios. “They voluntarily took on this research project and devoted many hours to researching this company and preparing both a written report and a slide presentation highlighting their conclusions. We are privileged to represent the CFA Society of Milwaukee at the next round of competition in Denver. We thank all of their volunteers for making this a wonderful experience – including the efforts to provide the students with career advice and more interaction with investment professionals. We also want to thank all the teams from around Wisconsin that competed in the competition this year as well as their advisors and mentors – it was a fantastic competition that just gets better every year.”