Presentations And Fancy Dinners

I finally did my IAG presentation on Friday. For those who don't remember what IAG does, we do equity research on a company and try to pitch it to the club to get it added to the portfolio. My teammates and I presented on a Brazilian pulp manufacturer called Fibria, and the presentation itself was very good -- we got compliments from everyone (including the veterans) on how well we did -- but unfortunately, when it came time for the numbers and the valuation to come up, that's when our presentation went to hell.

I think Tik put it best when he said, "For the first half of the presentation, I was thinking, 'wow, this is a really great company'. But then as I kept hearing more, I started to wonder, 'damn this company is just too perfect.' In the last quarter of the presentation I realized there was a catch when you talked about the company's massive debt load and shitty valuation."

To be fair, the company was just involved in a huge merger two months ago and acquired $2 billion in debt in the the process. That really screwed up our numbers for us, so while our presentation and the company's fundamentals were excellent, we got fucked in the valuation. Right before the presentation, my groupmates and I were freaking out about how badly the numbers made our company looked and we were all sure that the company would lose the vote. Well, we did lose the vote, but it was a lot closer than we thought it would be, 21-25.

It was a good experience though, and it was definately interesting to research a company that had recently been in a merger with a massive $5 billion worth of total debt. I've posted the link to the presentation below for anyone who wants to check it out; even though it wasn't put into the portfolio, they also show the return on the stock so it'll be interesting to see how much it'll go up or down. I also heard from someone that this was the first time a presentation was ever video recorded(?) but it hasn't been uploaded yet so I don't know if that's true. If it ever comes up I'll post it for you guys.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~iag/presentations.php



Anyways, after the presentation, I went out to a fancy dinner with my fancily dressed friends to celebrate Mark and Ana's fancy birthday! It was fun seeing everyone dressed up in suits and nice dresses. We were even able to get a bottle of champagne for the table and make a toast for Mark and Ana, thanks to our generous host.

A fancy toast!

The fancy restaurant

The food was delicious, the waitress was excellent and the restaurant owner was incredibly nice and friendly. The dinner and all made this an excellent night for the fancy person's club (well, we can at least pretend we're legit). We finally documented this night in front of the NYU arch, despite the fact the girls were freezing. But I think the picture came out well -- it was definately worth it.

A fancy picture for fancy people

-Emoinacloset

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh yeah, although this isn't really that important I made a hand turkey during BAP community service this morning. The community service was part of a mentoring program where we do bible study and play with kids from not-so-good neighborhoods. Anyways, I liked my hand turkey so much that I just had to take a picture of my rock star turkey and post it. Doing hand turkeys brought me back to the old days when I was still in first grade and the only thing I had to worry about was being able to color in between the lines. Enjoy my work of art, and happy early Thanksgiving!