MSF graduate comes full circle as competition judge

The Gator Student Investment Fund and Financial Professional Development Program hosted the Florida Investment Conference in early February.

Student teams across the nation submitted stock pitches and 23 teams were selected to attend the in-person event on the UF Warrington College of Business campus. California Berkeley, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern, North Carolina, Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas and Western University were some of the 23 universities represented. Students from Western University made up the winning team who received the $3,000 prize.

One of the judges for the event was Marek Hornak (BSBA ’22, MSF ’23), who knows the competitions well from his time as a student. Today, Hornak is an analyst at Evercore, but he was part of three first-place finishes and one second-place finish in pitch competitions as an MSF student.

“It was a distinct and unique experience sitting on this end of the table,” Hornak said after being a judge.

Hornak was paired with Will Harrell (MBA ’04) from Capco as his co-judge in a preliminary round. Harrell brought decades of experience while Hornak contributed his familiarity from prior competitions, making the duo a strong team. They share similar views on investing, which made their takeaways from the presentations comparable.

“Having won a number of these competitions I felt confident in being able to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the teams’ deliveries, especially the ease or difficulty of understanding the pitch,” Hornak said. “These pitches are a combination of oratory and investing skills, whereas a lot of the investment world runs on written memos and plenty of time to digest information.

“Part of the difficulty – and fun – of judging is trying to get the whole story across in 12 minutes and then clarifying the countless questions that come up in an 8-minute Q&A. The format forces students to consider the value of every word while balancing how much information the judges can absorb.”

Just two years out of the program, the knowledge of the students wasn’t a surprise to Hornak.

“It goes without saying that many of these students were incredibly impressive, especially considering this is an extra-curricular activity for most, on top of classes, student orgs, internships and plenty of other time commitments,” he said. “The students I got to meet had already gotten through the first hurdle of being invited to compete at the in-person event. Many of them had great jobs or internships lined up – a few of the competitors happened to intern at my firm last summer.”

Competitions played an important role in Hornak’s development during his time at Warrington. He broke the benefits down into three categories. First, the significant amount of preparation helps students learn what their career will look like.

“The real point of these competitions is not for a team to win – that’s added upside – but to plant a stake in the ground and say ‘this is my idea, here is all the work I’ve done to support it, and I’m willing to accept criticism head-on,’” Hornak said. “Any team that dedicates time and effort to an idea they own gets rewarded. There are few “learn by doing” experiences available to students that encapsulate the essence of a job in finance quite like these competitions.”

Second, the competitions strengthen tangible skills that matter to their future.

“A lot of what I do in my job is boiling down a ton of information into a logical and compelling narrative and then supporting that narrative with facts and quantitative analyses,” Hornak said. “Investing is much the same – gathering, interpreting and utilizing as much information as possible to inform a view and then taking ownership of that view and dealing with feedback. These competitions are a great riskless format to build these muscles.”

Finally, students are exposed to diverse viewpoints in finance.

“It’s the breadth of people that gather and with them a range of perspectives – on your stock pitch, on markets, on investing philosophies – all the things that matter in a finance career,” Hornak said. “I’d be hard pressed to find examples of events that hosted this type of collection, and it’s part of why I was drawn to participate as a judge, to continue to be exposed to new ideas coming from across the nation and even internationally.”