A New York University freshman, working all through his Thanksgiving break, showed he has the necessary investment smarts with his winning ETF idea for the "Next Generation EFT College Contest" run on the Internet and Facebook by Clear Indexes, LLC. The winning idea is a US Exporters Index that seeks to benefit from a growing global economy and the reduced value of the dollar. It is comprised of mid to large cap companies that obtain a material portion of their revenue outside the United States.
Selected from nearly 100 entries, James Baker, 18, the grand prize winner, will receive $4,000, a paid internship at Clear Indexes' Wall Street office, and the opportunity to work on publishing the live index based on his submission.
"We were ecstatic with the quality and variety of submissions," said Andrew Corn, CEO of Clear Indexes. "There were so many submissions consisting of high quality and unique strategies. The students obviously performed a lot of analysis to create their entries and worked hard to both prove and communicate their ideas. It was extremely difficult to choose just one grand prize."
"I was extremely excited to learn I had the winning idea," said Baker. "I worked straight through Thanksgiving break to make sure my ideas were clear and well thought-out. It's great that Clear Indexes let students participate in such a unique way in their business."
The two second prize winners, Anna Baburina, New York University and Pengcheng Lin, Lehigh University, will each receive a $1000 prize. Ten honorable mentions were awarded. Each winning submission is in consideration for index development and several winners have been contacted for potential internships. All the winners are acknowledged on the contest's Facebook group page http://nyu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5671398751.
Baker is graduate of Westhill High School, Stamford, CT, where he participated in the school's Academy of Finance program. This led him to an internship during high school at a leading European investment bank. From that experience, James formed the basic premise of his submission.
"I believe the student population in our country's universities is an untapped resource in creating real value in the economy before graduation" said Fred Fraenkel, Chairman of Clear Asset Management, the parent firm of Clear Indexes. "This was an invitation for students to apply their lessons from the classroom to a practical real world situation and they really took the opportunity and ran with it. I'm looking forward to the next contest in the spring, which will include more schools."
Clear Indexes, in search of more creative and original ideas, will launch its second competition for five to 10 additional schools for the spring semester as a result of the success of the first contest. The timing and schools will be announced soon on the contest's Facebook page.
The Clear Next Generation ETF Contest was open to undergraduate and graduate students attending Columbia University, Lehigh University and New York University. This competition ran from October 12, 2007 to November 26, 2007.
About Clear Indexes LLC
Clear Indexes LLC creates and publishes custom indexes using a combination of qualitative research and quantitative methods. Clear Indexes designs custom indexes to quantitatively measure specific market segments. The indexes are used for custom institutional benchmarks and investment product design. Clear Indexes is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Clear Asset Management Inc. For more information, please see www.clearindexes.com and www.clearam.com