CNBC MBA Challenge

Question

MBA student teams from Chicago, Tuck, Columbia, MIT, NYU, Yale, UCLA, and the University of Texas will compete for a $200,000 grand prize in the "Fast Money MBA Challenge," which will premiere on CNBC on August 1 and run through the rest of the summer.

"Fast Money MBA Challenge" will air 4 original shows in August at 9PM and 12AM ET on the following Wednesdays:

August 1st
August 8th
August 15th
August 22nd

All telecasts repeat on the following Sunday at 9PM and 12AM ET from August 5th through August 26th.

In each program, schools compete head-to-head in categories testing their financial expertise to accumulate money in a virtual "Investment Portfolio" for each correct answer. This "Investment Portfolio" is not the amount of money the team could win, but rather reflects the score of the game. Each game consists of three unique rounds of competition and the winning team moves on to the next game beginning again with zero in their "Investment Portfolio." 

The Championship game, airing Wednesday, August 22nd, contains an additional round of competition. The team with the higher point value at the end of the third round is awarded $110,000 in virtual money and the other team is awarded $100,000 to create a "Championship Portfolio" consisting of five individual publicly traded stocks. Each team's point totals are set aside and finalists will be graded on the actual market performance of their "Championship Portfolio" from the beginning of trading on Monday, July 16th through the close of the market on Wednesday, August 22nd. The team whose "Championship Portfolio" has the highest value will be declared the winner of "Fast Money MBA Challenge" on August 22nd live from the NASDAQ and receive $200,000 courtesy of TD Ameritrade.

mNeo · Answer

Sounds interesting. I better schedule the recordings.

dabots · Answer

i just watched some of this on a rerun...i get the impression these mba students do not follow pop culture at all

the question "what 65 year old once joked about smoking weed in buckingham palace and was later knighted" was a real gimme in my opinion, but both teams missed it. neither ever listened to the beatles?

kryzak · Answer

so supposedly my friend who does corporate law said that the students he saw in last year's MBA challenge had no clue what business is all about and he was shocked by the "quality" of these students from supposed top name schools.

while I have not seen this show at all, I'm curious as to why he would think that way. Did the teams fail to complete a challenge because they didn't learn some business skills? It was quite surprising to hear my friend say that about the top B-schools based on watching this show.

aviroop · Answer

Given that we are getting so overloaded with our b-school applications, I rarely have a chance to follow the world happenings (except when someone calls to tell me that britney spears got pulled over again for speeding).

In B-school, we will be swamped (fail to find stronger words) - so students can be pardoned for not keeping up with world events. Everyone's focus is on business developments, case studies, school and job hunt.

Just my 2 cents as to why the students had a poor performance.

mNeo · Answer

The questions asked in this CNBC challenge were more trivia based. There was almost no smartness needed in those questions. The only place where you could show some smartness was in the amount of money that you would bet on a question (In round 2, I think). 

Any sensible person would select a bet-amount based on the difference in existing scores of the two teams. For example, if you are the last person betting, and are 11000 ahead of the other team, then it makes sense to bet 10000. If you win, you will be more than 20k ahead of the other team (Thus getting an extra hint in round 3). If you lose, you are still 1000 ahead of the other team. But people were picking up betting amount just randomly (Except for one guy from Texas who used decent reasoning in the finals). 

Similarly, MIT Sloan guys could win their last round by getting one more hint .. but they decided to just answer the question without the hint, get it wrong, and get kicked out of the competition. Hello! Ever heard of "Risk Management"?

Finally, even the stock-picks that the finalists made were quite unimpressive. The logic that they used to pick up the stocks was "meh" at best.

So, yeah, the kids didn't impress me at all either. But not much of that had a lot to do with business-skills anyway. It was a simple trivia based game open to only MBA students. Nothing more than that.

dabots · Answer

im not saying they need to keep up with the tabloids, but if they dont at least know who britney spears is or who the BEATLES are then that's sad. regardless of personal opinion, both are musical icons and if you dont know who they are then you probably dont have a good pulse on american consumerism and would be a poor businessman.

kryzak · Answer

thanks mNeo for the review, that makes more sense now... I will TiVo this and watch it during my breaks between essay writing

dabots: Haha, I didn't know the answer to that smoking weed question either... never really liked nor followed the Beatles... sorry. Britney Spears however, I know quite a lot about!

mNeo · Answer

They all were pretty good with the stock tickers at least.

aviroop · Answer

Dabots,
you make a very valid point and you are totally right that these guys should be aware of the the latest pulses in American consumerism, but I have met tons of people whose knowledge on trivia and world affairs is so skewed or so poor that sometimes I wonder if they are ignorant.

This might be goingff-topic, but I am a huge soccer fan and follow all the European and World cup ongoings, and during a discussion, one of my b-school friends started talking how a pathetic and poor player Zinadine Zidane was (now infamous for his world cup headbutt). 
I sprung into action and asked him how much he knew about Zidane, whether he followed Zidane's awsesome quests in World Cup 98, Euro 2000, his glorified career in Bordeaux, Juventus and Real Madrid.

The poor fellow knew nothing - he just made a statement based on some discussions he had in some B-school rendevouz.

While your point is true, there are quite a lot of people who really dont follow much of what goes on in the world. Perhaps a lot of them got represented in that TV show. This is just speculation from my part as I have not seen the show.

mNeo · Answer

Ahaa .. a soccer fan. Which clubs do you support (Yeah, I am continuing going off topic)? I've been a big fan of the whites (No, not Real Madrid .. but Leeds United. Unfortunately the last few years have sent them down to such a level that I get almost no news about them here in the States

). I also used to play this soccer management simulation game called Championship Manager (Later, Football Manager) to manage Leeds out of its troubles and back to the Champions League glory in the virtual world. But the real Leeds kept going the other way

ps. I like Real Madrid too, BTW

ncp · Answer

Aha, finally a chance to show off my FANTASTIC/FAN(ATIC) soccer knowledge. 

mNeo, my friend. You may just have the opportunity to manage the real leeds united to a premiership. How? you ask. 

Have you heard of  myfootballclub.co.uk . It's a fan run org to which every football fan contributes 35 GBP or so each. The money accrued will be used to buy a real football club. Each fan will thus own a portion of the club and will vote on team decisions inclufing who to hire? where to practise? what uniform to wear? etc. 

Guess what football club is at the top of the hit list for this syndicate.

You guessed it. LEEDS UNITED.

Praetorian · Answer

Looks like we need a sports section on the Club. I know we have basketball maniacs too.

mNeo · Answer

ncprasad: This is a novel idea. But to be honest, I do not want Leeds to be the guinea pig of this experiment. Let's try this idea on a conference team like Cambridge first :twisted:

We are screwed enough already. And I don't think Ken Bates will let the club go out of his hands so easily anyway. ps. Fixed the domain name for you Praet: Yeah .. I was also thinking of posting something about the battle of the bay as I know that a lot of GMATClubbers are from the bay area. It would have been fun to make fun of some Raiders :lol:

ncp · Answer

mNeo, Mark my words. the Raiders will do better this year than the 49ers. As long as the raider offense can score 15-20 points a game, our kick a** defense will win games for us.

aviroop · Answer

and what about college football - the season has not started and USC is no. 1. As an USC alum, I feel that disgusting. After getting our butts kicked last year left and right, there are plenty more schools that deserve no. 1, not us.

gmat_march · Answer

And how about the year before last, when Vince Young single handedly took the rose ball away from you guys ? Playing well and still loosing is all the more disheartening ..aint it ? Interesting they picked Utexas with the likes of Chicago/MIT/Tuck/Yale ... Am a UTexas alum and have been living in Austin for 5 years now, and Utexas did not even cross my mind while deciding my schools ... Having some second thoughts now

...nah, 5 years is long enough !!

ishcabibble · Answer

Yeah, I was kind of wondering how UTexas fit in with that group also. It was kind of funny, though, because I was working on my essays while this was on and Mr. ishcabibble came running into the kitchen to tell me I needed to take a break and check it out!

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