Club News

The Chicago Quantitative Alliance Investment Challenge is one of the most prestigious university-level investment competitions in the world, bringing together top programs from institutions such as Santa Clara University, Nanyang Technological University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Northeastern University, the University of Pittsburgh, and UC San Diego. Teams spend months constructing and managing quantitative equity portfolios while being evaluated on investment thesis, risk management, and final returns.

Competing under the name Alpha Strategies, Dávila and Landis built a disciplined long/short equity portfolio that balanced conviction-weighted positions with tight risk controls. Their strategy emphasized factor-based security selection, trading over 360 times throughout the challenge to actively rebalance their exposures.

"This win is a huge moment for our program. It proves that students at UNM can compete with — and beat — the very best quantitative finance programs in the world."

The team finished with a video score average of 1.33 across three judges, secured the #1 ranking in return performance, and carried zero demerits through the entire competition — a remarkable feat given the discretion judges apply to trade documentation and risk compliance. Their consistency across both qualitative and quantitative scoring categories is what ultimately sealed the championship.

Looking forward, the Lobo Investment Club plans to use this victory as a springboard for expanding its recruiting, increasing the number of teams it sends to future CQA challenges, and building out deeper curriculum around quantitative portfolio construction.

The Internal Portfolio Competition is the centerpiece of the Lobo Investment Club's educational experience. Each team is given a virtual $100,000 to deploy into a diversified equity portfolio, with no single position allowed to exceed 10% of total capital. Teams are permitted to short stocks but cannot trade ETFs, derivatives, or use margin — forcing them to rely on fundamental analysis and thoughtful position sizing.

This semester saw ten teams enter the competition, with performance judged by a blend of total return and analyst presentations. Team Effective Convexity distinguished themselves by deploying a long-short equity strategy — a framework directly informed by the quantitative techniques that David Dávila and Samuel Landis had refined while competing in the CQA Investment Challenge. Rather than simply buying a basket of long positions like most competing teams, Effective Convexity paired high-conviction longs with carefully selected short positions to generate alpha on both sides of the market and hedge portfolio-level risk.

"The CQA taught us that the real edge isn't just picking the right longs — it's knowing what to short and when. We brought that same discipline into the IPC."

DC Capital took a more diversified approach across sectors, emphasizing consumer discretionary and healthcare names. Their steady compounding put them in a strong position, though the team acknowledged that a few missed entry points on high-conviction names kept them from closing the gap with Effective Convexity.

Money Multiplier rounded out the podium with a balanced portfolio anchored by mega-cap technology exposure. Their trading activity was notably more measured — a deliberate choice to let high-quality compounders do the work rather than chase short-term momentum.

Prizes were awarded at the Oak Hill Advisors & IPC Awards Ceremony on April 16th, where members also heard from senior investment professionals on private credit and AI in business. Recruiting for the Fall 2026 competition will open early in the semester.