The Wildcats of Wall Street

A student-run equity fund provides hands-on experience for students pursuing careers in financial services, specifically sales and trading, investment banking, and asset management

By Claire Curry

In the summer of 2021, after her junior year at the Villanova School of Business, Jennifer Overlan ’22 VSB secured an internship at Morgan Stanley. Soon after, she accepted a full-time job offer, successfully launching her career as a trader on the firm’s Investment Grade Credit Desk.

Overlan says her participation in the Villanova Wildcat Fund—a student-managed investment fund with over $2 million in assets under management—played a pivotal role in landing the competitive positions.

“The Wildcat Fund offered us the opportunity to manage real money,” she says. “That real-world experience and ability to highlight skills that mirror qualifications for internships like this are game-changing.”

While Villanova’s student-run investment club began as the Equity Society in 2015, it evolved into the Wildcat Fund in 2020, according to the fund’s co-advisers, Stephen Padovano ’89 VSB, director of VSB’s Applied Quantitative Finance Program, and Jerome Heppelmann, executive in residence in the Finance and Real Estate Department. Now, students across any major who have completed the Villanova Investment Academy’s training program—usually as sophomores—can deliver a stock pitch before the advisers and, if selected, work as analysts in the Wildcat Fund. To move up from there, analysts can apply for a two-semester elective course and become portfolio managers.

“Each student is then responsible for a sector, along with that sector’s group of younger analysts,” explains Padovano, whose résumé includes 22 years in trading at Merrill Lynch. The sectors are energy, materials, information technology and health care, among others in the stock market’s Global Industry Classification Standard. The Wildcat Fund uses a combination of bottom-up fundamental analysis and social responsibility screening to select securities for investment in the fund.

Juggling the club’s intensive workload and the demands of other upper-level courses is challenging for students, but the payoff is invaluable. “The most advantageous aspect is the ability to experience the responsibilities, camaraderie and work output of an asset management job,” says Heppelmann, who managed mutual funds and institutional assets for nearly two decades.

Overlan participated in the fund throughout her undergraduate years, serving as an analyst, a member of the executive board, a portfolio manager and, ultimately, president. “I developed a wide variety of skills across financial analysis, time management, public speaking and leadership,” she says. Overlan especially values the support she received from peers and mentors, including alumni who met with students to run practice interviews.

“We know when they come out of this experience, students are ready. We are teaching them how to be successful in the business world,” Padovano says.

The Villanova Wildcat Fund has been wildly successful. Since its inception in 2000, the fund is up 82.54%, and it has outperformed the Russell 1000 Index, which tracks the 1,000 top US companies by market capitalization, by more than 9%, Padovano says. The fund currently boasts more than 120 participants, and last year all 24 portfolio managers landed competitive internships. Of those, 23 received job offers at major banks and investment houses, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.