High Marks for UAF Investment Class.

• Author: JONES, PATRICIA
• Position: University of Alaska, Fairbanks, lets students manage real money

The UAF Student Investment Fund prepares students for investment careers as these savvy investors receive returns as high as 107 percent.

David Osborn was a 19-year-old business student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks during his first semester in a hands-on investing course. He found that classroom experience to be a pathway to his present career as an Anchorage-based financial advisor.

"I was a shy kid in the background, listening to the officers and trying to learn all I could," said Osborn about his first semester in the Student Investment Fund at UAF, a 400-level business class offered by Dr. Mary Lindahl.

When Osborn started the class in 1998, the Student Investment Fund was valued at $186,000, considerable growth since its inception seven years earlier with $100,000 in seed money.

During the bull market of 1998, Osborn and a group of technology-savvy student investors took the fund up to $311,000, an increase of nearly 70 percent, achieved within a 12-month time frame.

The phenomenal growth continued in 1999, as the UAF student investors posted a 107 percent increase for that year.

"We did a lot of projects and presentations and got a better feel for what was going on in the economy," Osborn recalls. "Our goal was to get the highest return for assets under management."

His experience and two years in the UAF investment class paid off. Now, Osborn, age 22, works as a portfolio assistant at McKinley Capital Management Inc., a registered investment advisor based in Anchorage.

"Any time you have impressive returns, you're going to get attention and that will get you inside the door," Osborn said. "But once you get inside the door, you have to start from scratch and work your way up."

Starting Off

According to a brief summary of the UAF Student Investment Fund's history, the hands-on money-making class started after Alaskan students placed fourth in a nationwide simulated trading game in 1990.

A year later, $100,000 of University endowment money was transferred to a newly created Student Investment Fund account at a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter office in Fairbanks. Since then, School of Management students at UAF have been managing the account.

Initially, students followed a conservative investment approach, putting $60,000 in certificates of deposit and purchasing well-known company stocks such as Boeing, Compaq, Liz Claiborne, Pepsi and Sears with the remaining amount.

"We dollar-cost-averaged over a couple of years as we didn't want...