Here Are the 3 Winners of the FactSet Special Situations Contest
By: SumZero Staff | Be the First to Comment
We are pleased to announce the Winners, Runners-Up, and Honorable Mentions for the third leg of the FactSet Top Idea Tournament, the Special Situations contest.
We would like to thank everyone who participated, including the judges panel, as well as our partner FactSet Systems for their support in this initiative and their sustained commitment to the generation of differentiated investment research. For those participants whose ideas do not appear below, your ideas remain in contention for performance-based cash awards, as well as the Grand Prizes, given at the end of the year, all worth $66k and much more.
Today's winners take home nearly $25k in first-stage awards, products from FactSet, and more. The next phase of the Tournament launches in early March with a Best Mid-Cap & Larger contest.
Your winners in the FactSet Best Short contest are:
1st Place: Steven Wood, CFA (GreenWood Investors)
Long on Finmeccanica SpA (FNC:IM)
Elevator Pitch: New CEO with a great track record assumes the helm, seeking to unwind 7 decades of a rollup. Asset sales, restructuring, de-leveraging, and cash returns; trading at a significant discount.
Steven Wood, CFA founded GreenWood Investors in late 2010 when he was 28 years old, based on core beliefs that are quite different from typical total-return investment managers. We believe great investments cannot be made by being overly concerned with month-to-month returns, and investors should have full transparency and liquidity. We share our research with our sophisticated investors, who in turn provide invaluable insights in honing our portfolio. Prior to founding GreenWood Investors, Steven worked with notable investors at Carr Securies, Kellogg Capital Group, and Aslan Capital in distressed, deep value, and special situations strategies. Walter Carucci of Carr Securities provided most of the inspiration and support during the founding of GreenWood. Through frequent marathons and by being the sole US-focused analyst in Leveraged Finance at RBC Capital Markets during the peak of the LBO boom, Steven has developed a high pain tolerance, a pre-requisite for value investing. Dissatisfied with just one view of the world, Steven received a bachelor of arts from Tulane University in Economics, Political Economy, and International Relations. After a few years of producing terrific individual stock research but terrible macroeconomic calls, Steven began the Global Micro strategy, focused on making concentrated investments in world-class companies trading at significant discounts and run by best-in-class management teams. The Global Micro Fund, founded in December 2013, seeks to significantly outperform the MSCI All World Index by shunning macroeconomic trades, but hunting in the most fertile hunting grounds. Recently, as global investors have been chasing US momentum stocks, the fund has become increasingly Southern European, as the competition is lower, the market’s margins are at a trough and the cyclically-adjusted PE ratios support long-term favorable returns.
2nd Place: Ian Clark (Dichotomy Capital)
Long on Atlas Energy LP (ATLS:US)
Elevator Pitch: Atlas recently sold off a majority of their assets through a complex transaction. New Atlas offers investors a >40% distribution and plenty of growth options.
Ian Clark is the Managing Director of Dichotomy Capital. Dichotomy Capital is a long/short manager that utilizes intensive research and a contrarian mindset to find undervalued securities, special situations, and timely shorts. The Fund utilizes a rigorous process to identify, evaluate, and catalog investment ideas. The process is chemistry inspired to drive fact-driven security selection across a number of sectors. Ian began his career in chemistry designing organometallic catalysts and novel synthetic routes. The dislocation of 2009 led him to research a better way to invest. Applying the same approach utilized in his science background, Mr. Clark began publishing his investing ideas to receive feedback and criticism. His research has been highlighted in Institutional Investor, SumZero, Gurufocus, and several other publications. He earned a Masters of Science from the University of Oregon in 2009.
3rd Place: Winston Chu (HT Capital Management) & Perry Tan (Black Crane Capital)
Long on Energizer Holdings (ENR:US)
Elevator Pitch: Buffett type franchise trading at distressed valuations offering a huge margin of safety in every scenario. Re-rating to occur in spinoff details.
Winston Chu is an investment analyst at HT Capital Management covering regional Asian equity markets. He focuses on an independent value-oriented research process with a bias towards technology and consumer sectors. Prior to this, Winston interned at Fidelity Investments in Hong Kong as part of the Investment Initiatives team. He graduated in 2013 with a degree in Finance and International Business from University of British Columbia. In his first SumZero Short Contest, Winston was a Contest Runner-Up.
Perry Tan, CFA, CAIA, FRM, is a senior investment analyst at Black Crane Capital. Black Crane Capital, founded by Mr. Peter Kennan, is an Asian based investment firm focusing on deep value opportunities with a special situations angle including but not limited to distressed situations, unproductive assets, cheap assets, fallen angels, and potential corporate events such as M&A, spinoffs and friendly activism. Black Crane primarily focuses on identifying potential opportunities with asymmetric payoffs. Mr Tan was formerly an investment analyst with HT Capital Management, an equity long short Asian hedge fund based in Hong Kong. Prior to HT, Perry was an investment analyst with Barclays Asset Management. Perry is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. Perry graduated at the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Economics.
Please enjoy these excellent ideas with our compliments and stay tuned for the Mid-Cap & Larger contest coming in March. If you want access to all the ideas from the contest (Runners-Up, Honorable Mentions, etc) and the thousands on other pieces of buyside research,
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