·Activity Mentoring
Preparing an investment competition with someone who still does the job
Student stock pitches fail for ordinary reasons: a story with no model, a model with no risk, a deck that reads like a textbook. A mentor catches those early.
Investment competitions look glamorous in the brochure and ordinary on Sunday night. You need a thesis you can defend, a model that does not fall over when someone changes a growth rate, and a pitch that survives a skeptical question. Watching recorded lectures does not get you there. Repeating “undervalued” without saying compared with what also does not.
Start with a question, not a ticker
Students often pick a famous company because it feels safe. Mentors usually push the other way: what disagreement do you actually have with the market? If you cannot state that in two sentences, the rest of the work is decoration. The first sessions are for that question, not for slide templates.
The model has to argue
A working associate will not be impressed by a 40-tab workbook if the conclusion lives in a single hardcoded number. We keep the model small on purpose. Drivers should be visible. Sensitivities should be honest. If the pitch dies when revenue growth moves by two points, say so in the deck before a judge finds it.
Risk is not a slide you copy
The weakest section in student pitches is almost always risk. “Execution risk” and “macroeconomic uncertainty” are not analysis. Name the thing that would make you wrong: a competitor’s price cut, a regulation date, a customer concentration you can measure. Then say what you would watch after the competition is over—even if no one asks you to.
What the Actify challenge includes
You are paired one-on-one with an investment professional. Together you pick a competition, set a calendar, and iterate on the memo and the deck until they are submittable. There is no lecture series to complete first. If a session is not moving the pitch, we change the session.
After you submit
Win or not, you should leave with a piece of work you can talk about without inflating it. That conversation matters in interviews. It also matters if you later join an internship and the manager asks what you have actually built.
Related programs
If a track here matches what you are trying to do, start an application. We reply with fit and timing.