Blog 4: Week 2

In my time at MAI thus far, I have been asked to sit in on meetings, listen to people talk, and look over documents, but this week I was asked to do my first real project that would be of value to the firm. MAI can essentially be broken up into two distinct groups: research and investing, and those on the research side spend time doing the due diligence on various securities, ensuring they are both potentially profitable and risk averse investments. Upon assessing these factors, the research team can then choose to add said security to the "approved list", meaning that investors may purchase this security for their clients if they wish. 

One class of security that the research team looks into for their investors is mutual funds. A mutual fund is essentially a fund run by professional money managers who invest a pool of money that is aggregated through the investment in said mutual fund. When assessing whether a particular mutual fund will be approved, the research team takes into account a variety of factors such as historic returns, allocation among asset classes, and most importantly, the manager. 

MAI's research software, factset, allows the team to analyze these markers within seconds, and pools thousands of data points on each fund to help them decide whether or not to approve a specific fund. However, the data that factset provides is limited to the fund itself, and not the manager. Meaning that, when you pull up the figures, it simply shows the returns and statistics of the fund, and does not delineate if there was a change in management and when, and how returns changed.

To remedy this issue, I was tasked with analyzing and aggregating data for over 100 mutual fund managers to present to the research team, making their decisions easier to make. To do so, I had to do a plethora of research on each manager, their history, the performance of the funds they have managed over time, and enter all the data into a spreadsheet. I then ran a regression analysis of said data to provide more valuable insight into how each manager performed against their peers, to do so, I learned the basics of a coding language, python, of which I have never used.

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