MFIN team earns top prize in ACG Cup competition

A team of Freeman School Master of Finance students traveled to Baton Rouge on Saturday (March 28) and came away with first-place honors in the 2015 ACG Cup, the Association for Corporate Growth’s annual M&A case-study competition.

Presented locally by ACG Louisiana, the competition challenges students to analyze a complex mergers and acquisitions case and offer their finance recommendations. ACG members who are experienced M&A professionals serve as judges. The competition took place at LSU's E. J. Ourso College of Business.

This was the first year that the competition was open to Master of Finance students as well as MBAs, and the Freeman School’s MFIN team made the most of the opportunity. The students — Yutiancheng "Tian" Hu, Yinuo "Perfeeno" Wang, Qian "Ann" Wu, Yulu "Evelyn" Zhang and Yuan Zheng — beat out MBA students from LSU and University of Louisiana - Lafayette to win the top prize of $2,500.

“It was a great opportunity for us to put what we’ve learned from the MFIN program into practice,” said Hu. “We treated the case like a real M&A deal, so it was exciting to be able to pitch our investment ideas to the judges. It was just an amazing teamwork experience. I wish our team could work a real LBO deal together in the future.”

Each year, the ACG Cup gives hundreds of MBA students from leading business schools across the nation the opportunity to apply classroom studies to real-world experience and gain invaluable insight into the field of mergers and acquisitions, investment banking, financial advising and private equity. Founded in 1954, ACG is a global organization with 56 chapters. ACG’s 14,000 members include professionals from private equity firms, corporations and lenders that invest in middle-market companies, as well as from law, accounting, investment banking and other firms that provide advisory services.