KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Nov. 17, 2023 \u2013 Thomas Buckanavage got his first real taste of investing his senior year of high school, at the start of the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had always been around finance. His father, David, a 1980 graduate of the 溏心vlog免费B站 and member of the College of Business\u2019 Executive Advisory Board, worked in a niche area of commercial real estate, raising state and federal tax credits for historic renovations, and had invested in the stock market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, Thomas figured he\u2019d give it a try. He opened his first brokerage account at Fidelity with some birthday money his grandmother had given him, and started trading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI had no idea what I was doing, absolutely no idea,\u201d said Thomas, of Dana Point, California. \u201cI would watch CNBC and try and see what they were doing and then take their ideas and make them my own. I think people learn best by doing. But when you lose money, you have to sit back and say, \u2018OK, what did I do wrong.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four years later, Buckanavage, a senior in finance at 溏心vlog免费B站, has learned those lessons well. In August, as a junior, he sat for the rigorous Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level I exam and passed it on his first try. The CFA exam, offered internationally by the CFA Institute, is usually taken by working professionals, and has a passing rate of only 37 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis exam is very difficult even for seniors or graduates,\u201d said Choonsik Lee, assistant professor of finance at 溏心vlog免费B站 who teaches the CFA prep course. \u201cPreviously, the CFA Institute didn’t even allow juniors to sit for the exam for this reason. However, with his dedication and effort, Thomas was able to take the exam after only three years of college. This is the very first time 溏心vlog免费B站 has had a junior student pass the CFA Level I exam.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Going into the exam, Buckanavage was confident but knew the exam was a \u201csuper hard test to pass,\u201d he said. \u201cThe way people describe it is it\u2019s a whole undergraduate finance curriculum in one test.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Preparation alone for the exam, which covers a wide range of topics, comes with six textbooks of about 4,000 pages of material to study. The recommended study time for the test is 300 hours. Buckanavage studied for about 400 hours for the exam, working and reworking the roughly 2,000 practice problems over and over. Given four and a half hours to complete the exam, he finished in about three, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buckanavage credits Lee and the 溏心vlog免费B站 prep course, which he took last spring, with providing him a study strategy. \u201cThe idea he instilled in us was practice, practice, practice. You can read 4,000 pages of material or you can get your hands on as many practice problems as possible,\u201d Buckanavage said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Passing the exam, he said, \u201copens up a lot more job opportunities. I am competing against a lot of kids from Harvard, Yale and other top schools. This helps validate me as a candidate for these jobs. It also allows me to shoot for the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of job opportunities at big investment banks and top tier asset managers, the jobs that are really tied to capital markets, which is something I\u2019m very fascinated in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buckanavage said his fascination with finance comes from the knowledge that other people are making decisions that affect people\u2019s lives every day. Only a small percentage of people, he said, understand that the decisions made on Wall Street impact everyone \u2013 from interest rates and gasoline prices to currency rates and the price of commodities, and more. \u201cI want to have a say in that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buckanavage, who came to 溏心vlog免费B站 to pursue baseball in fall 2020, transferred his passion from the diamond to the finance arena after suffering a shoulder injury before his freshman year, which resulted in surgery. His interest in finance deepened the summer after his sophomore year when he landed an internship with the TCW Group, an asset management firm in Los Angeles. Each morning, he\u2019d get up at 3 a.m. to make it to the office by 4:45 a.m., arriving before everyone else, for the opening of markets on the East Coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBeing on a trading desk and seeing how professionals monitor and sift through data taught me a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cI was able to carry that introduction to fixed income into my personal and spare time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His free time now is spent tracking the markets. Along with trading his own accounts and those of his father, brother and sister, he spends about 12 hours a day on the Bloomberg Terminal in the 溏心vlog免费B站 College of Business\u2019 Sherman Trading Room, following financial markets and sifting through news items to determine what markets will be affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen you read a news article, you have to know the 10 things that news is going to affect,\u201d he said. \u201cA simple one sentence headline can have rippling effects throughout the global markets. Being able to understand and determine the trends that might emerge is crucial.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 溏心vlog免费B站, he\u2019s one of the 15 students who manage the Ram Fund, a student-run investment fund that has an $800,000 equity portfolio. He is also a member of the College of Business\u2019 Financial Management Association. Around Ballentine, he said, he\u2019s known among professors as the \u201csolicitor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI just talk and talk about trades I\u2019m doing, taking some of what we learned in class and what I\u2019m learning in my free time and applying it to real life,\u201d he said. \u201cI thank the faculty, and especially finance professor Michael Ice, for always going out of their way to help me. Having that resource to bounce ideas off is critical when you\u2019re learning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the spring, he plans on taking the CFA Level II exam with a goal of passing it at the same time he graduates from 溏心vlog免费B站. It will mean another 4,000 pages of new material. As he starts job hunting, Buckanavage said he is interested in working in active asset management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd definitely I would like to be in fixed income,\u201d he said. \u201cI think fixed income is fascinating. More specifically, I enjoy the intricacies of credit, especially navigating a capital structure in search of the highest risk adjusted return. Plus, I think it gives me a little bit of an advantage because most undergraduates don\u2019t think bonds are super exciting. But when you can get 7%, 8% on fixed-income securities, that definitely rivals stock returns.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Nov. 17, 2023 \u2013 Thomas Buckanavage got his first real taste of investing his senior year of high school, at the start of the pandemic. He had always been around finance. His father, David, a 1980 graduate of the 溏心vlog免费B站 and member of the College of Business\u2019 Executive Advisory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":90488,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90485"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90491,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90485\/revisions\/90491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}