Project Summary
My project for March Madness is to use investment strategies that hedge funds use on my portfolio and to create a profit for myself in the process, hopefully. Another component of the project that I added later was identifying areas of the market that haven’t been as affected by the recent pandemic, Covid-19. I chose to do this project because it’s something I’ve always been interested in from a young age since my father works in finance.
The first step I took in my project was to get a much clearer understanding and definition of what hedge funds are and the strategies they employ. I did this by finding credible sources on the internet and interviewing people who had prior knowledge on the subject, such as my dad and Nick Berry, whom I met with on March Madness night. I learned a lot from these sources, especially Nick Berry, who taught me about the current state of the market during Covid and how to successfully invest in it by finding sectors that Covid hadn’t as hard hit. I was also able to learn about the many strategies that hedge funds use, such as long/short term equity, merger arbitrage, convertible arbitrage, event-driven, and credit-centered strategies. He was also able to give me a list of hedge funds to get ideas about structuring my portfolio, which helped immensely.
After I gathered this information, I finally implemented it on my portfolio to ultimately improve it. One piece of information that helped me greatly in this process was to look into sectors that relied heavily on online retail and invest in them since online retail during Covid increased 13 percent. It was also essential to look into stocks that had seen increased use during Covid, such as Zoom and Amazon, as well as other online retailers. Overall all the information I had learned about the subject of hedge fund investment strategies allowed me to achieve my ultimate goal of increasing my own portfolio.
