Established in May 2000, the Saluki Student Investment Fund exists to provide SIU undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on experience in portfolio management and investment research. As such, the SSIF is modeled after a real investment management firm. SSIF students are focused on making the best possible investment decisions on behalf of their primary client, the SIU Foundation. The SSIF’s investment philosophy is to capitalize on opportunities through focused research. The SSIF’s competitive advantage is students’ unique and unbiased perspective and their ability to spot trends in the markets, especially those that are perhaps driven by or favored by their generation.
In implementing the SSIF’s investment process, members work in teams that focus their research on companies within specific sectors, such as the technology, financial, or healthcare sector. Each team’s goal is to choose the companies within their sector that give the portfolio the best chance to outperform the midcap equity benchmark. This requires students to put their class lessons to work within a professional environment. Moreover, students learn to collaborate and to take responsibility for their analysis and decisions as they make the case for their investment ideas.
The SSIF is open to undergraduate students from any major. In recent years, SSIF students have been majors in Accounting, Business Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Physiology/Pre-med, and Psychology, with a majority being from the College of Business. Since 2011, numerous SSIF members have gone on to be employed at firms such as ADM, Bank of America, Fitch Ratings, HNI Corporation, Interstate Batteries, JP Morgan Chase, NISA Investment Advisors, and Stifel Nicolaus.