A solid investment

It all began on an airplane napkin.

In 2005, Jim Jones (MBA ’06) and Xan Moore (MBA ’06) were flying to their summer internships in New York. At the time, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School did not have a stock pitch competition, and they were told there wasn’t room for them to participate at another school’s event.

They decided to start their own.

During the flight, Jones and Moore outlined the basics of how it would work on the back of a napkin and sketched a rough bracket. When they returned to campus that fall to start the second year of the Full-Time MBA Program, they pitched the idea to Professor Greg Brown.

“Greg wouldn’t let us call it the first annual Alpha Challenge,” says Jones. “He said, ‘If you call it the first annual, it’s guaranteed that there won’t ever be a second one.’”

Two decades later, the Alpha Challenge is one of the U.S.’s elite investment pitch competitions and an integral part of the UNC Kenan-Flagler MBA experience for students eager to join the highly competitive investment management industry. Each year, over a dozen U.S. business schools send students to Chapel Hill to compete in front of nearly 100 of the top names in the industry, many of whom are UNC Kenan-Flagler alumni who attend each year to judge or connect with students during networking sessions.

Alpha Challenge isn’t just a competition — it’s a three-day event that Jones calls a rallying cry for the Business School’s Center for Excellence in Investment Management.  For many students, it’s an exciting preview of the future and the exact type of experience they crave and demand before heading back to the job market.

Alumni have been critical to the Alpha Challenge’s success and the innovative investment management curriculum. From the beginning, they have sponsored the Alpha Challenge and fueled its growth.

“It’s been called the NFL combine of the investment management industry,” says Jones. “You go in and run your 40-yard dash, measure your vertical leap and everybody sizes you up. It’s the opportunity to shine in front of the best employers in the world. When we began creating Alpha Challenge, we knew that we could go toe-to-toe with the best anywhere. And we have.”

Crossing the bridge

He lives 800 miles away, but Jones is never far from Chapel Hill.

A partner at William Blair in Chicago, he is among the many alumni heavily involved in planning the competition year after year.

His work doesn’t end there. For over a decade, Jones has helped students prepare to enter the industry he loves through teaching the Fundamental Investing Practicum. Designed for first-year MBA students but open to all in the program, the class focuses heavily on equity and credit analysis and goes deep into concepts such as valuation, idea generation and market penetration analysis. Working professionals who guest lecture and mentor students make the world of investment management immediately more accessible and less intimidating.

“In this particular industry, there’s a long bridge from the academic world to the real world. Even just the words that are used in the typical classroom are different from the words used in the professional world,” says Jones. “Our students come out knowing how to speak the language. It only fuels their passion for the industry further. It makes it real.”

Jones addresses the crowd during the 2023 Alpha Challenge

In addition to the Alpha Challenge, investment management students have a litany of unique courses and experiences finely tailored to individual interests, especially within the Capital Markets and Investments Concentration.

In 2020, a generous gift from Jones sparked a new vision for the Center for Excellence in Investment Management and expanded offerings centered on experiential learning. Professor Pramita Saha is the center’s executive director and Professor Ric Colacito is its faculty director, with Professor Gill Segal leading the concentration. Jones is the chair of the center’s advisory board.

There’s the long-running Applied Investment Management course, where students manage a real portfolio with the state-of-the-art PNC Capital Markets Lab (CML) at their disposal. Newer opportunities include PRIME (Projects in Investment Management Experiential-Learning), where undergraduate and MBA students work with firms, and on-campus events such as Investment Management for All: Wealth and Women which Jones was integral in developing.

During the 2024 Alpha Challenge, Jones received the center’s inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award. For him, the most exciting part of the honor was knowing that it will highlight the work of an alumnus every year.

“It’s the UNC way,” says Jones. “I go back and teach and plan the challenge because Carolina gave me everything that I needed to have the career and the life that I’ve had. I don’t think giving back is just in my DNA. That’s in the Carolina DNA.”

Talking the talk

Jones knew exactly what he was looking for when he enrolled at UNC Kenan-Flagler. After earning a bachelor’s degree in finance from Miami University in 2000, he worked for a few years as a senior associate for investor-relations firm Ashton Partners.

“Even though I had sat on the other side of the table, and I was focused on what I wanted to do, I was saying all the wrong things in interviews because I didn’t have that strong bridge,” he says. “I was the guy who just took the alumni database and called anybody who would listen to me because I had that passion, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Somebody would say, ‘OK, pitch me a stock,’ and I’d give them my academic response and they’d say “OK, that’s not how that actually gets done.”

The PNC Capital Markets Lab

At UNC Kenan-Flagler, Jones found a core group of peers who shared his love for investment; they’d sit together in the PNC CML trading room and spend hours talking about it.

He recalls a moment that confirmed he was in the right place. After an earnings report from American Express, one of his classmates began interpreting American Express’ latest earnings and what that could possibly mean for the high-end consumer in other industries. That was “mind-blowing and massively exciting,” Jones says.

“It sounds simple, but he was just taking this information and drawing a conclusion, but I was just like, ‘These are my classmates,’” he says. “I was learning so much from them and I couldn’t get enough.”

That classmate, Dennis Greenway (BSBA ’99, MBA ’06), now a senior analyst and portfolio manager at Franklin Street Partners, has been a longtime Alpha Challenge judge.

Jones didn’t just focus on investment management at Carolina – he immersed himself in it. He’d join classmates at dinners with Professor Mustafa Gültekin and talk about stocks. Investment lingo permeated everyday chats.

When the group talked about what to have for lunch, they began using the terms “long” and “short,” reflecting the slang for when a stock is expected to go up or go down, respectively. Saying you were “long hamburgers,” meant you were good with getting burgers that day. If someone said they were “short sushi,” they might have eaten sushi for dinner the night before and prefer something else.

“It wasn’t just one thing that hooked me,” says Jones. “It was the experiences, talking to professional investors. It was the camaraderie with my classmates and the voluminous learning I was taking in on a minute-to-minute basis.”

But there was one aspect of his experience that particularly struck a chord with Jones — the sheer number of UNC Kenan-Flagler alums dedicated to helping a new generation of business leaders succeed. For Jones, emailing and cold calling alumni for advice never failed to lead to hour-long phone calls. No one treated him like a stranger.

That was a game-changer for Jones. It continues to be, even when now he’s the one changing the game.

“I am still blown away by the alums and their willingness and ability to help Carolina students reach their goals,” he says. “And what the Alpha Challenge does is continue to bring people together. It’s like a family reunion every year, and it’s created this community of people who not just share this passion for investment management but a passion for looking out for each other. That’s the Carolina magic.”