Good afternoon everyone. It's great to see all of you here. I think I know just about everybody in the room But for those of you, I don't know my name is Susan McTiernan I have a pleasure of serving as Dean of the Gebelli School of Business here at Roger Williams University I cannot believe this great turnout given the storm the cafe alums are definitely a brave bunch of people Coming out in this weather to be with us for this very special event Which is one of my favorites at the university every year We're looking forward to a great presentation from the current cafe students And I know you all are looking forward to a great rest of your day and evening I would like to recognize a couple of people who have joined us from the university administration Right so that's why I can't see you So without any further ado I'm going to turn this over to this wonderful group of students who will be here in front for the next hour or so and I will get back with you after their presentation with a couple of more thoughts and comments Thank you very much Dean McTiernan. Welcome everybody to this semester's cafe portfolio presentation My name is Clay Casiano. It's my left way of Zachary Moran. It's my right Sean Sweeney We make up the associate directors of this semester's cafe program Now usually if you guys have been to a cafe portfolio presentation We usually show you guys both growth and value however today We're going to be doing something a little different and just presenting to you guys our growth portfolio Before we begin we'd like to preface you a certain situation that happened to us in the cafe The best way to describe the semester is to break it up into two time frames at the beginning Our growth on was positioned to run the whole market and our performance showed that however recently we've seen sectors move Sorry We've seen money move from high-valued sectors to lower-valued sectors And then these eight student fund managers had to reallocate nearly 50% of our growth fund in just these past five days The experience that these student fund managers before you have experience is nothing that has happened before in the Tenured program quite frankly it's something that we don't ever want to happen again And to begin I'd like to invite up Sarah Paul and Corinne to begin the presentation Now before we start I just wanted to thank Clay and Zach and Sean for just such a great job that they've done with us as associate directors They really have given us so much experience and knowledge that we've used and without them would have been possible So thank you so much guys Ladies and gentlemen tonight you're sitting in front or you're in front of eight student fund managers Who have experienced a semester unlike no other in the cafe program? I think I speak for all of us when I say that we have experienced the highs and the lows of this market as we Mere industry in a way that not only developed as a students But also gave us real-world experience and showed us how this business could often be very harsh due to in this sense we Consistently we're doing our due diligence and fulfilling three rules right away when we came to this program as we were acting as Not only student fund managers, but analysts fund managers as well as traders We first met on a Wednesday and by Thursday we had our first assigned all-nighter during this all-nighter We came up with probabilities and scenarios. We thought were likely throughout the semester We thought this would prepare us for anything, but as we soon realized no nothing can prepare you for the market in our chaos What we place likely scenarios in green and the unlikely scenarios in red some of the major topics We discussed were Trump's agenda corporate earnings to the direction of oil prices as well as the effects of hurricane Harvey At the beginning of the semester. We did not believe that oil prices would rise above 60 $50 However throughout the semester we saw them rise up to 60 which directly affected the energy sector as it went from lagging to leading I was going to just mention hurricane Harvey was huge for our group because this was the first time that we really had to act React to the market as a collective unit to make changes for what we were seeing at this time We were looking at short-term and long-term opportunities for us to capitalize on such as changes when the oil and gas Prices as well as changes within consumer and discretionary sectors as consumer spending patterns were starting to change The chaos theory allowed us to anticipate how events such as this would impact the market It also allowed us to gauge if the bull market would continue to year-end or we see a slight correction Over the course of the first 235 trading days We saw the bull market continue on its path and drive companies prices upwards This can be shown in our correlation matrix and the boxes showed in red display high correlation between two companies At this time It wasn't a problem for a portfolio as all prices were moving in a positive direction Now with this level of irrational exuberance in the market It's safe to say that we were constantly busy throughout the semester as we use an active management strategy With a strategy like this we're able to monitor both of our portfolios There are every single minute of every single trading day ensuring that our portfolios are performing a lot of our objectives now there is a lot of Gains that we did see from using the strategy and it did contribute heavily to our performance However, it doesn't work in some scenarios like when you go to Greece for example Well, we had an amazing time in Greece We still had actively managed both of our portfolios as we were getting fun performance every day from our future student fund managers However, one day that we did not have access to our funds was when we were traveling home So we had to take a passive approach for just one trading day While we were all relaxing on the plane We were completely unaware of the changes in the market as investors began to take their money from high valuation tech and healthcare companies into lower valuation Financials and consumer discretionary companies this change within the market showed investors taking profits on companies that have seen sufficient price appreciation over the year With our funds positioned towards the older trends that we were seeing in the market Let's just say when we landed in Boston turn on our phones and check the previous day's closing report It wasn't a very warm welcome home In fact, we'd underperformed the S&P 500 by 1.74 percent in just one day alone This is what we like to call the perfect storm Everything we had previously known had changed and we had to reallocate our portfolio accordingly Companies that were leading our portfolio for the entire year were now underperforming as investors were looking for lower-value companies Also sectors such as energy which were lagging became leading on news of OPEC production cuts that boosted stock prices Expectations of the corporate tax reform started to drive industries such as banking and transportation as they would benefit the most Also, Chinese tech companies had just come off of their worst performing week as the Chinese government began tightening rules on lending Now if we backtrack to the beginning of our semester There was some skepticism within the market as there really was a dissension between fundamentals and stock price valuations However, there was no telltale signs to us that showed that it was stopping anytime soon Investors were consecutively buying these dips driving price points even higher on a day-to-day basis And with that we were a bit confused at times But we utilized a top-down approach in order to look at the entire globe to ensure that we were covering all our Basis making sure that we're missing any information that could have told us that this repositioning was occurring and of course the only way You can start such an analysis is through an in-depth International as well as domestic out in our domestic analysis We looked at trends such as M2 consumer sentiment unemployment in GDP to come to the consensus that as a group We were moderately bullish on the economy moving forward We then looked at these trends worldwide and saw favorable ones in the China and Neuro zone Utilizing this top-down approach allowed us to key in on specific areas with driving tailwinds as well as analyze global markets We then evaluated on an industry specific level and evaluated companies through a fundamental technical and behavioral analysis Now taking this approach to the market You're able to key in on specific areas as well as sectors that you feel might outperform others Although that this did pay off for us in the beginning of the semester as we were running with the bull market With this reallocation and repositioning amongst investors that we've discussed Essentially the market had taken our weightings that have been so tried and true to us and turned a positive into a negative We would now like to introduce you to our growth holdings The one involved are the one that we just had a recent reallocate in our fund and we'll explain why you see some negative holding period yields on your fact sheets Also, I'm looking at a five-day correlation matrix You can see that now none of our companies are running to correlated together Which was essential when we were doing our portfolio allocation We would now like to begin our holding discussion and talk about some major changes made in the last three trading days Starting with the telecom sector. This was a sector that up until a week ago We chose to avoid all together based on our original top-down analysis moving to your end We felt that the sector lacked the key catalysts and growth drivers moving forward in order to generate adequate returns for our Fund our top-down analysis proved true throughout our semester all the way up until the last week and was a key success Driver within our fund uncertainties surrounding mergers and acquisitions Paired with price companies within the industry for two of the main reasons. We decided to underweight this sector However, the S&P's weighting of this sector is two percent We chose to allocate this elsewhere as we felt the downside outweighed the upside Fundamentals within the sector simply did not meet our investment criteria as companies balance sheets were showing rising costs and shrinking profits This was due to intense pricing pressure taking place within them a sector Where companies had to slash prices in order to remain competitive with their peers? This led to an overall loss of brand loyalty for these companies as customers were just simply looking for the lowest price that they could find Three of the four major competitors within within the industry were facing uncertainty surrounding mergers and acquisitions throughout our semester T-Mobile and Sprint were in active talks And we saw that every time a news headline came out surrounding those mergers that there was a price swing that was usually to the downside Now AT&T is another company actively pursuing a merger and acquisition with their recent agreement to acquire a time Warner Cable this deal is in an attempt to boost their entertainment offerings as the rapidly losing market share to companies like Netflix and Hulu Now this would be a fantastic addition for the company But the deal was just recently hit with an anti trust lawsuit that has put the entire merger in jeopardy And as you can see this has created a tremendous amount of volatility for the stock And this was just simply too much company specific risk for us to take on with it our company This leaves us with Verizon the company we have recently decided to add to our portfolio given the recent market shift We've seen one reason being that Verizon is the third highest tax company within the S&P 500 Given that the recent tax cuts have gone through the house and Senate We think this will dramatically increase Verizon's bottom line and one reason we wish to hold them within our portfolio On top of this the company just reported a fantastic quarter quarter for the added over 700,000 wireless subscribers to their network Their superior network speeds competitive prices and strong fundamentals make us extremely competent in the company moving into 2018 And the strength of the company can also be seen by looking at their churn rate Which is the lowest amongst their peers the churn rate indicates how many subscribers are moving one net from one network to another This paired with their subscriber growth shows that we have confidence going with this company moving forward We would now like to transition this from our lowest weighted sector to our highest weighted technology Now moving on to our most significant weighting It is impossible for any investor to ignore the gains achieved this year in the technology center And for the majority of the year was driving up on forward although investors new valuations were extended money continued to pour in They justified these prices by believing these companies that long-term catalysts that would drive growth moving forward delaying the inevitable rotation out of tech Unfortunately, we saw this rotation out of tech within our holding within the past few weeks And we saw tech drop almost 4% in just over in just under three days With this being said we knew with our new reallocation We need to stick with what we thought was trying to true throughout our entire analysis Making specific metrics that we knew each single company we were evaluating fell thin such as a high EPS growth rate as well as a low Pi ratio, we're currently invested in six companies within the technology sector among our positions We chose to focus on checkpoint Alibaba and T connectivity as we feel these holdings are solid more probably valued And we'll be of interest to talk about today because of their long-term catalysts As we've just discussed we clearly see that the tech sector has run with the bulls throughout our holding period And because of this we want to focus less on the companies that have ran with the bull market throughout the earlier sector And we want to focus on the companies We've recently reallocated into that we see growth drivers for through the future One of our new positions with considerable catalysts for growth is T connectivity T is a leader in supplier of passive electronics specifically harsh environment connectivity products. These are the products that are Heat resistant and heavy-duty like the ones found in automobiles planes among other applications Not only has TE seen a favorable demand environment They've also seen strong sales execution shown in their consistent price appreciation over the past four quarters We've also seen them continue to expand and diversify across their many industries Showing they have healthy growth and price movement for the years to come Their main drivers increase electronics adoption and automobiles accounting for nearly 40 percent of total sales The advancement of driver assistance programs as well as the increased adoption of electric vehicles are both significant catalysts for connectivity and sensor products These segments are boosting electric content revenue by two to three times the pace of auto production Now to put this simply even if we were to see an environment of slowing or constant auto sales and production TE is still going to benefit from these trends as the product for vehicles is constantly increasing with new technology and Electric components being put into these vehicles every single day We also see companies are constantly looking for innovations to increase the safety fuel efficiency as well as usability with these cars Increasing their price per car. Just think doesn't it seem like yesterday that we had cranked windows in our car And now they're literally driving themselves We see that TE has perfectly perfectly capitalized on these trends and we see growth moving forward Industrial fiber optic and aerospace segment segments are also benefiting from this trend and are seeing favorable long-term growth Commercial airline and fleet modernization are long-term catalysts for TE's Aerospace and defense segments with new content to focus on real-time monitoring electronic controls and in-flight entertainment Within this new fund We also wanted to focus on companies that had international exposure and TE fit this bill completely showing almost perfect diversification across three different regions the United States Europe as well as the Asia Pacific region While it didn't take in consideration of all these analysis tools We wanted to focus heavily on technical analysis of this company as we saw that with our new consumer sentiment market We wanted to make sure that it was a hundred percent the correct time to buy it on a yearly chart The trend is clearly up with price accelerating during a holding period The tech sell-off we experienced last week did not affect TE as severely as it did for many others illustrating its superior downside protection price remained above its support line shown here in green as well as a 50 Simple-moving average highlighted in red these factors together indicated Sustainable growth as well as perfectly fit our new emphasis of lower valuation Catalyst-driven technology picks another company we felt met this same metric is checkpoint Check what was a company that we invested in early on in the spacer And we were confident about the cyber security-wide trends that we were seeing with this set as all the alumni in the Audience know we perform an in-depth analysis on every single company Ensuring that they see the risk is outweighed by the potential reward The first indicator that we might want to reevaluate checkpoint is when their direct competitor for net reported earnings a few days prior They saw a price tip of over 3% even after announcing lower-year guidance as well as EPS Surprise of over 20% With this set we knew that this was company specific risk But check points price also dropped that same day indicating a possible cyber security-wide trend along with this concern Expectations for delayed product cycles as well as 30 million dollars in lost revenue from mandatory company shutdown for Israeli holiday Yonka or added to the consensus for increased earnings risk. The stock price was also trading above the set target price Indicating sufficient downside further adding toward decision to take our profits Our due diligence paid off when we sold checkpoint and later the stock sold off more than 12% Because of our original love for this company We knew that we wanted to revisit them and reevaluate them while we were repositioning our new funds But this said we saw that with their earnings drop as well as the top the tech sell off They were now properly priced and set for growth We also saw that their PE levels were now properly set as well Showing that we thought they had a history growth on us in the future One of the major reasons we like checkpoint in the first place is increased demand for cyber security services Given the industry has a compound annual growth rate of 8.47 percent Businesses and consumers have faced a seizure sophisticated cyber attacks putting companies reputation and financial well-being at risk Further making checkpoint services not much more appealing Based on all things that Dylan and I discussed with you all We are excited to say that we did indeed invest back into checkpoint And we're excited about the growth catalyst moving this company forward through with our new fund Moving on to our last tech company We want to step away from some of the bigger known tech names the companies that we even hold our funds such as Facebook And talk about a lesser known company to the average individual well You may have heard of Alibaba you may not know why it's poised for growth over some more well-known domestic technicals in our fund We look for international exposure into markets. We have confidence in Staying consistent with our top-down approach we view the Chinese tech sector as an area with high growth opportunities Specifically in the bats or the Chinese version of the banks Now to a specifically fundamental analyst this company may have been overlooked due to their high Evaluation at about 56 times but that being said we compare them to their well-known domestic competitor Amazon Who is currently trading at the second highest PE in the entire S&P 500 index We knew that this meant that they were better poised for growth within the sector opposed to Amazon We also saw that the e-commerce industry as a whole was trading at an extreme premium Making Alibaba the perfect fit in an industry that we knew we could not miss out on Availability and relatively low cost of telecom networks in China has greatly contributed to the increased popularity online shopping This has also enabled mobile device users to search enhancing the retail experience and online brand engagement Suggesting an internet everywhere approach your shop Alibaba has recently hit three trillion dollars in sales an amazing feat that they happen to come upon in only 13 years in the business To put this in a perspective giant Walmart took 54 years to hit this same metric We also looked at the packages in the processing that these companies are processing each day And Alibaba is currently processing over 12 million packages a day compared to Amazon's three million In addition to this we saw China as a great spot for growth as they are currently Representing over 28% of the mobile and online retailing industry while the United States only accounts for around 12% Another area of the market where we stressed our top-down approach and emphasized lower valuations was in consumer discussion We'd now like to invite up Pete and Ashley to discuss our holdings within the sector with regard our ratings and consumer discretionary We decided that we wanted to under-buy the sector these reasons include the fact that we expected the week outlook and overall holiday retail sales decreased a decrease in retail competition as well as overall trends in which personal spending would decline as semester wore on them these Increased outlook and news metrics showed that consumer spending was increasing Oh, I was an overall outlook and the holiday retail season was also going up This led us to reevaluate our position and become mark weight rather than underweight within this sector This shift away from technology's high evaluations led investors to cheap companies within the undervalued consumer discretionary sector This sector have been previously beaten down and neglected due to weak sentiment heading into the fourth quarter and a less than impressive earning season Now what you need to understand is that with millennials driving the sector There has been a shift in spending from material spending to experiential spending people would rather buy memories and objects Do this shift in the market? We decided to take a step back and reevaluate our holdings One of the things we did was re-evaluate our through with our top-down approach analysis in which we Evaluate all the companies we held and decide that we need to sweep them for new companies that better fit our approach One of the examples of this is Lure Corporation a company within the auto parts industry that we decided to sweep for was Win Resorts Win Resorts is an casino and hotel operator that has places all across the globe in which we felt this better exemplified the fit for experiential spending rather than material spending that Ashley mentioned before now Win Resorts has consistently outperformed the industry for the whole year The best part about casinos is their all-encompassing nature. You go there you get gaming, lodging, entertainment, eatery and drinks What more could you need? By purchasing Win Resorts, we gave ourselves exposure to two major tourist hubs for the price of one Domestically Las Vegas has been revitalizing itself and seen an increase in visits year over year Due to a decrease in the unemployment rate and an increase in consumer spending people will turn to casinos for their own inclusive enjoyment Also, Win is also a major player in Macau and a autonomous region that's part of China near Hong Kong Which is the only place within the country where gambling is legal We'd like Win to do the fact that it just recently built a fully integrated casino resort within this area and the Catash Strip The Catash Strip was important due to the fact that it's not the common slimmer to Las Vegas We feel some of this region is going to continue driving Win forward If you look at the company's quarter over quarter spending People or more people are visiting this country in this region in order to increase In order to go gambling and spend their money The reason is that more people are focused on material spending rather than our focus on experiential spending Excuse me rather material spending. We expect to see this increase as time goes on through the fact that more people are going to this region Now while we are seeing this shift in spending There's still an inevitability in fourth-quarter retail growth as US consumers We need to realize that our shopping trends follow those of Europe and Asia by at least 18 months Watching the success of companies like Zara and H&M. We set out to find the next big thing and we found it Fast retailing is one of these examples in which we found that company that manufactures and designs its own retail Club that caters of both men and women this company operates within three main business Segments Niko Japan Niko global as well as global brands Headquartered in Japan. We felt this company had growth potential to move back that it's caring to a wide customer base in Asia With over 300 millennials as well as plans to expand internationally Already Asia's largest retailer the company seeks no less than to become number one in the world by 2020 to do so They're leveraging their quality products and aggressive pricing with their international expansion and acquisition schedule in addition Due to their foreign country of domicile the company is exempt from trading that is centered around the corporate tax rate sorts of growth for fast retailing include India and the United States Already they're planning on expanding to both these countries through the fact that previously They're untapped for the company as it already has a strong market within Asia We expect this growth to continue and they're using the strategy of coming in with lower prices and higher quality goods in order to Develop and build their brand among a wider customer base that caters to multiple segments of people They look so confident in the industry We decided to add to our holdings in order to capitalize on the best-positioned companies We decided to move away from domestic producers that are tied to a more income middle-income consumer and target a more luxurious market This led us to Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy a French King Glamour in the world's largest producer of luxury goods Their brands not only embody the good life and everything flashy, but as many as the moms are in the room can attest to they make a beautiful handbag Compared to fast retailing which is rapidly expanding the United States Louis Vuitton has already established brand the strong loyalty and a prominent exposure within our country Heading we're looking at Louis Vuitton What you want to see is cyclical year-over-year seasonal growth and one of the companies like this do the fact is cyclicality You want to see the growth in the second half of the year do the fact that is a luxury good And during the holiday retail season you want to see that expanding and do the fact that the revenues of this are increasing year-over-year We felt this company was a strong pick for our font when you compare both fast retailing Louis Vuitton they both are diversified due to the fact that they're in multiple segments within the industry with one being lever You have luxury goods the other one being in a big segment retail Also, due to the fact that geographic segmentation is different. We have confidence in both companies heading towards Iran When looking at our discretionary holdings we decided to sweep a lot of our changes and to change our waiting when looking at consumer staples We decided to keep our holdings as well as maintain the waiting we had in the beginning of semester as our parents always ask Do you want this or do you need this that's a difference between consumer discretionary and consumer staples Consumer discretionary. These are the things that we want the things we siphon money away from our parents to pay for Consumer staples these are the things we need the groceries we occasionally buy with our grocery money We decided to be market weight and consumer staples due to its ability to head against loss on days That the market is driven down by a behavioral news centered around Trump's administration possible tax reform and geopolitical turbulence We have found the sector to be the ultimate balancing act within a market that continues to reach new highs But also experiences volatile behavioral swings within a sector that thrives on economic uncertainty We still picked up stocks that will thrive regardless due to their internal growth catalysts and ability to outperform all their competitors Walmart has been able to exceed our expectations and position itself to compete with Amazon by offering order online and pick up in store This company has been able to use their developed infrastructure in order to increase the speed consumers able to buy their products Also walmart's acquisition of jet.com allows them to expand their e-commerce platform Propel their online inventory they're offering due to these factors Walmart has been has seen considerable growth And we expect to see the growth continue into 2018 Now you have Walmart that sells paper towel into a paper towels and toilet paper But has earned the nickname wall monster the company is continuing to grow and grow competing in a realm that it never has before We're seeing Walmart morph into a virtual mall Even taking a dig at Amazon saying that it's better to be a marketplace than an empire Go online look up Walmart, and you'll be amazed by their innovations if you're too laser go brush grocery shopping Just like I am now you can use their online grocery curbside pickup service If you're sick of waiting in long lines, their automated towers can retrieve your online orders in a matter of seconds Company can also afford to sell their goods at prices cheaper than Amazon because their buy online pick up in store Tactics has eliminated the majority of the shipping and handling costs The second company that we've decided to persistently keep on our fund is constellation brands Well, some of you may be unfamiliar with this company most of you will be familiar with their brands This company is an international marketer and producer of a variety of beers wines and spirits Some of their brands include Svetka Corona and Robert Wendavi wines We like this company due to the fact that the company has strong fundamentals compared to its peers and its competitor Heading into 2018 we see the company adding more brands as well as being able to build up its new products Good plans on creating and continuing to drill through this app now saying on top of the whole millennial trend There's been a shift towards more specialized beers and wines Well, we can't give ourselves exposure to the extremely profitable cannabis industry We can give ourselves indirect exposure through constellation brands creation of a cannabis infused beer by having constellation brands in our portfolio We will experience growth in a sector that hasn't competed compared that well to the market Now let's shift gears and discuss a sector that we were extremely confident throughout our entire time in the cafe My personal favorite financials now, although we did Consistently keep a consistent weighting within this area of the market It's not to say that we didn't sweep out some of our old holdings for some new companies That we felt were better poised for the market that we were seeing Some of the key indicators that we love throughout our entire semester in the financial sector Were the cheap valuations as well as an increasing Probability of tax reform one of the first changes we made to our previous holdings was sweeping discover for our previous holding visa Visa had been trading at a price that was about 30 times its earnings and Discover gave us the exposure into the credit sector that we believe would best exhibit growth over the long term We then compared discover to its direct competitor capital one and as these metrics may seem similar We decided to choose discover due to their lower risk associated with the asset The next decision that we had to make was to cut city and Blackstone group Now Blackstone group is an asset management company that although did show future catalysts moving forward Wasn't performing as well throughout our holding period due to the fact that there wasn't a lot of volatility within the economy and That ultimately just minimized the need for their services Additionally asset management as an entire industry was the most overvalued area of the financial sector Ultimately forcing us to look elsewhere for cheap profits The last change that we made was taking our profits on Citigroup as they had a solid holding period as well as Revenues that in that went into other sectors that we thought were best posed for growth in the financial sector We then added Morgan Stanley and PNC into our fund PNC generates its revenues from retail and corporate banking while Morgan Stanley caters to the global asset management side We believe that both of these companies will exhibit growth due to the tax reform because they have some of the highest effective tax rates The last financial holding that we want to present to you guys today is S&P global for SPGI Now this is a company that Karim and I have loved from the beginning of the semester due to their Responsiveness to economic trends and indicators such as responding below the low interest rate fluctuations Lower P multiples within the market as well as tax reform now. This is a company that That provides financial services as well as data analytics to the clients within the industry and have consistently grown Their demand for their niche financial product adding on to this the company has seen an increased boost in revenues as well as they have minimal competition as they Only have two other companies that cater to the same business segments that they do The reason why we chose SPGI over its competitors was due to their strong margins and higher growth potential Now if you look at SPGI in the beginning of our semester This company looks very attractive with over an 8% return potential as well as fantastic analyst recommendations Now although this is attractive if you look at where the price is at today You'll see exactly what Karim and I are talking about and the way that this company is consistently respond to the change in market trends that it was facing Well, it might seem like there is not much growth potential left This company still has a 7% return potential along with strong bullish analyst recommendations While we did hold this company within our fund at the beginning of the semester We re-evaluated it and we still believe that there is immense growth potential left We now want to switch gears and look at the real estate sector But this is an area that Karim and I battled about throughout the entire semester about whether or not it was even worth investing in As there was minimal things driving it not a lot of big things moving with it. However After we conducted some due diligence What we found is that there is areas of this market that can drive it forward and one of those areas being industrial rates Typically on a risk-to-reward basis the real estate sector generates the lowest amount of returns for the greatest amount of risk However, we still decided to market weight this sector as we believe we have truly found a company that represents a needle in a haystack That being Prologis. Now, this is a company that has outperformed the sector ETF by our upwards of 14 percent throughout our holding period and since our buy-in date Prologis for those of you who don't know Prologis provides distribution facilities to manufacturers Retailers as well as the district providers including some big names that you guys might be familiar with In addition, this company had a fantastic balance sheet with extreme liquidity as seen by the immense amount of cash and total assets to cover their existing debt obligations Prologis has been able to generate increasing cash inflows in order to maintain and grow company operations One of their main reasons why this company has been able to generate these operating cash flows was due to their acquisition of KTR capital partners in 2015 now if you look at their cash from investing activities You'll see a significant capital deployment Now although this is risky for the company to go out on them and put this much cash on the street You'll see that they leveraged it to increase their revenues with cash flows increasing and an increasing rate and then solidified their position within a rock saw and market and Narrowed the margins between themselves and their customers and some of the world's most highly populated regions Some of these locations include los angeles and new york city Exposure to these areas has allowed Prologis to dedicate and Detail to the e-commerce industry Including companies such as amazon and walmart as they have high demand for e-commerce products Well, you may think reeds are exciting. Let me show you something that's truly exciting basic materials Leondo basil has a tier 26 percent for us on the year This company is a producer of plastics that have a variety of applications for the construction materials As well as biofuels We like this company heading towards your end Mostly do the fact that their growth within china as well as being in operating in 80 different countries Within china. We're looking at growth for three for a set for three cup for a couple of reasons One is that they just recently completed a manufacturing plant in this country That is due to the demand of rising electric cars Going into earnings season. We conducted our due diligence and found several potential suites to leondo basil Don't get me wrong. These sweeps had huge growth potential But they also had extremely large swings after earnings In an attempt to preserve our alpha We decided to keep leondo basil due to a safer earnings history compared to competitors Strong fundamentals and catalysts for growth growth moving forward We also decided to hold leondo basil through the fact that we saw a significant price appreciation that outflown the market And even though we saw this price appreciation its p-year issues did not see significant increase This is due to the fact that the company's earnings match the price appreciation Meaning that the company remained properly valued within our fund Therefore this company not only out from the market but still remained valued and continued growth heading into 2018 Now we don't want the excitement to end just yet So we're going to cover utilities We determined that this sector was not going to be a place for explosive growth But other than that it's going to be a continuous grower as well as a hedge against the downturn the down days in the market But that being said we decided we wanted to stay marketing this to capitalize on that hedge against the risk We decided to invest in aqua america a water and wastewater utility that segments in the southeast region of the united states We bought in in early february and we still see them to be a continuous growth driver for our fund Throughout the year. We have seen its exception of growth outperforming the utilities etf by over 10 percent since our buying date Acquisitions are a key Play for utilities in order to grow as it expands networks and user bases and aqua america is a leader in this category We've seen this company over the past five years Complete over 84 verges and acquisitions showing they're extremely dedicated to their inorganic growth with increasing their market share As well as their customer base on an increasing basis We also like their self-sustaining Self-sustaining model as they only rely on outside resources for their water for eight percent of their water As opposed to their direct competitors being in the 20 to 30 times range for this exact metric These factors along with with its ability to hedge against systematic risk in the market are some of the reasons why we chose WTR for our funnel Now we like to transition over to a sector and positions. We all hopefully find a little bit more exciting Our healthcare analysts will now discuss some of our great positions Now the healthcare holdings currently in our fund We're not the companies that we held throughout the entire semester The company is displayed behind me where our actual holdings for the majority of the time that we were in cafe But we as we mentioned we had to shift our focus away from more highly valued stocks into more lower valuations This was especially crucial for the healthcare sector, which is currently trading with a forward pd of 35 times Now this led us to the tough decision to sell one of our top performing holdings on the year aligned technologies Align produces and sells the invisible eye a clear retainer system used to correct teeth misalignment And it's rapidly taking market share from traditional wire braces as the convenience and cosmetic benefits of the product When we held aligned we saw an over 123 percent holding period deal one of the highest in cafe history and something We are extremely proud of this group. However, during that same time We saw their pe stretch from 41 times to 73 times Now we have reevaluated the company at 50 60 and 70 times earnings But each time we saw the company company's growth is unbeatable with absolutely no end in sight However, when the company hit 73 times earnings, we saw many investors start to take profits as the company began to sell up So at 123 percent We decided to forego our greed and take that and put it into a more undervalued company within the sector This led to our decisions by avit laboratories a company that manufactures and sells healthcare products that are sold worldwide And it's trading with a forward pe of 22 times When we were looking for a healthcare company first week We wanted to find a company that had diversified revenue streams in order to protect us from the uncertainty surrounding the healthcare bill avit did just that with the revenue streams stemming from nutrition diagnostics Pharmaceuticals to medical devices Now avit last quarter posted double digit revenue growth in both their medical device and pharmaceutical segments And this is exactly the type of rapid expansion that we look for within our growth holdings On top of this their nutrition segment, which accounts for roughly 33 percent of their revenue Is exactly the type of the diversification we were looking for against the potential downsides of the sector On top of their diversified revenue streams avit has recently applied our allure a global manufacturer for rapid point of care Diagnostics equipment and through this acquisition should solidify their leadership within the diagnostic space Since the acquisition has gone through in october avit has said that they will see 700 475 million dollars added to the company's top line before year end On top of this avit also acquired st. Jude medical in january and since that time the two companies have had a seamless transition This merger has allowed avit to compete in every single aspect of the cardiovascular market Which generates over 30 billion dollars each and every year the combined product portfolio will have great value to avit's existing customers Also, since the acquisition they have already seen profits and management is now focused on expanding their product portfolio And reaching financial objectives and has already raised full year guidance for 2017 Now this type of fundamental and behavioral analysis was absolutely crucial to our success throughout the semester But we also had to keep in mind what the street was saying as well Looking at analyst recommendations from bloomberg We could see 14 buy ratings with an average price target set just below 62 dollars a share This implies an 11 percent return potential and is just one more reason why we wish to hold the company moving forward We would now like to introduce you to one of our final health care holdings that we are very excited to share with y'all today thermal fissure is a company that provides Analytical or analytical services to organizations worldwide Now one of the main drivers for the company moving forward is their impressive sales growth in china Which was nearly 20 in their last quarter This was driven by china's five-year plan focusing on food and other safety measures And this should be a continuous growth driver for their products moving forward on top of this This is a prime example of our use of the top-down approach As we were extremely bullish on the on the chinese economy moving into year end The company is seeing revenue growing in china at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent from 2011 to 2016 They are expecting continue to see this demand. So they have recently opened a Place there to Facilitate their growing demand lines there We would now like to switch gears to our industrial sector an area where we see growth towards year end One of the biggest decisions we have made this semester was to continually overweight our exposure within the industrial sector Some of the key macroeconomic trends that we saw moving till year end were increased infrastructure and defense spending New housing starts as well as home rebuilds after the hurricanes Now with all these economic indicators working in the favor of the sector We really did feel that the majority of our previous holdings were very strong picks and adding Stanley black and decker In early october, we felt that with our original positions rathion, masco as well as xalan We were positioning ourselves for a sustainable growth as we headed towards the year end First company we'd like to talk about is building products company masco This company was severely affected by the three hurricanes that hit north america in september After they released earnings they saw an initial price shock However, the price shot back up as investors knew this was only short term and would drive their products moving forward Looking to have a technical chart, you'll see exactly what current is just talking about As after earnings the price depreciated slightly but then bounced back up as volume was moving in a bullish direction As also the MACD crossed the signal line in a bullish manner For us this signified that sentiment was up as was price momentum and we should continue holding the company within our fund As we evaluated masco further, we knew that their high demand for their products Outweighed all of these factors and moving forward this company would provide us with significant gains Backtracking to our chaos theory that we conducted in the beginning of the semester Home improvement was always an area that we thought would benefit from the hurricanes that we saw earlier this year Having seen the price appreciation of masco as well as the returns within our fund We believe that our initial presumptions were ultimately right Increasing wage growth and tightening up the labor market has increased disposable income Now that people have their available cash on hand They are more likely to purchase new homes and given such a great credit environment Was another reason why this company will strive going forward The next company we want to present to you guys is xylem This is a company that has positioned itself in a seemingly timeless industry water infrastructure For those of you who have never heard of xylem, they offer a wide range of services That deals with collection distribution and returning water To areas in the usa as well as across the globe For these reasons, we felt that this company was going to provide gains for us as they were consistently seeking new market share Currently only one out of every nine people have access to potable water Which means that xylem has increasing opportunities to expand their market share xylem also has favorable fundamentals when compared to their direct competitor In addition to this xylem also does a fantastic job at separating the revenue streams as they have a fantastic geographic segmentation that has contributed to this performance against the sector etf This this company has returned double for us since we've held it in our fund and we've seen no signs of its stopping In fact, just based on their revenue segmentation It's important that we know that 60 percent of their revenue comes from outside of the us and areas such as Europe As well as Asia Pacific region for all these reasons that Corinne and I have discussed We truly did feel that this company was going to continuously provide provide returns for our fund going forward Like to conclude our holding discussion with the energy sector another area were up until a week ago We would have told you we had a zero percent holding in However, one of the lessons we learned in the cafe is to never invest in a company unless you truly understand the underlying asset Now some of you might assume that it'd be easy to predict the movement of oil prices given how much it affects our daily lives But as we've all learned throughout this semester This is truly not the case as unpredictable news headlines continuously created huge price movements for the commodity We learned this lesson the hard way when we invest in slumberj on september 28 This company provides oil services to companies across the globe We felt that by investing in a company that provides services rather than the exploration of production We would get the energy to energy exposure We desire while still being protected from the underlying commodity asset Now ultimately this investment philosophy didn't pan out As the company was still affected by the volatility of oil prices We decided to sell the company in order to cut our losses and prevent further against the downside Which is a key responsibility that we have as student fund managers And after considering the volatility and unpredictability of the sector moving to your end We felt that we could utilize this extra weight elsewhere in sectors that were more poised for more consistent growth This investment philosophy ultimately panned out as we saw a negative 7.5 percent return in the sector throughout the year However, given the recent market shift that we keep we've been talking about We decided to buy back in when we saw tailwinds to push growth for the long term Now our initial hesitation of getting back into energy is what comes from what many people in the finance industry call being snake bit We as well as the groups before us had bought into several energy companies throughout the year Each time losing out with the volatility of the sector as a bull But given the recent run we've seen in oil prices. We see long-term growth opportunities in chevro One of the world's largest oil producers We decided to take a three percent stake in the company nor to get the energy exposure We need if the sector is to continue to run the company is investing in the fermion basin Which is one of the largest oil producing regions in the u.s. Where over two million barrels of oil are being produced each day The basin holds over 160 billion barrels total and only 20 of the resources have been depleted Chevron's generation in that region is exceeding expectations with over 200 000 barrels being produced each day Which is up 30 year over year on top of this their liquid natural gas projects in australia are expected to add over 200 000 oil at bull boom barrels per day in 2018 when they reach their peak production Since the first quarter of this year their production has already increased 80 and this growth is expected to continue into next year as well So this is including our holding discussions and we'd like to invite up pete and ashley to talk about some valuable lessons We learned throughout this semester Not everything in cafe was glamorous. There were also several brutal lessons We learned during our time here encompassing both our value fund and our growth fund One of these was the third quarter earnings of whirlpool when searching for value in such an over inflated market whirlpool to us looked perfect As some of you may know whirlpool produces household appliances Mainly washer strides and refrigerators We like this company due to the fact that it expected increasing cash flows as well as strong margins Before learning about whirlpool all I knew was that they made refrigerators We stumbled upon whirlpool around 2 a.m. One morning during pitch week and decided to delve deeper The company seemed to be everything that we were looking for it was cheap and had been beaten down But still had catalyst for growth moving forward Despite these positives whirlpool missed their third quarter as earnings for share estimates leading to initial price drop of roughly six percent Later that same night after whirlpool had already reported their earnings sears announced that they'll no longer be caring Welcome products after having carried their products for over a hundred years This led to another price drop of roughly four percent and the company stopping out the next morning All those was extremely hard for us to handle as though it was the first time we have been significantly hurt on one of our holdings It forced us to realize that due diligence doesn't always pay off Systematic risk is inevitable and the market is a medicine itself. It didn't ask our permission and it certainly won't ask yours Certainly does not actually Now the last lesson we took away from the past week is that in investing One can live by the sword, but also die by the sword The key to gaining alpha is weightings with our fund having heavy weighting in technology financials and industrials are holding depreciating significantly throughout the year As we became accustomed to our growth portfolio running on up days in the market. We were living by the sword But as all of you know the sword has two edges and we learned the other edge very well During the past week our fund had underperformed leading to an initial price drop of an alpha of 1.7 percent However, due to this rotation we decided to change our weightings by increasing our weighting within consumer discretionary telecoms and energy by doing this We were able to learn that we needed to key in on these industries because they were the ones that we felt looking forward Be able to grow more One of our main lessons that we were able to learn is that even though the market We think we can know the market We do not and that the market could shift at any time and that when you live by the sword You also die by the sword as well with all that being said we don't want anyone to feel too bad for us If we have still performed very well in the year Without further ado, we're extremely excited to present our growth portfolio's performance We'll just still outperform the market on a risk-adjusted basis We would like to start off by comparing our fund to similar funds with the same objective as our own As you can see our fund has performed within the mid range of our peers as well as outperforming our comparative benchmark the s and p 500 While we're extremely proud of these raw returns Something that doc has always taught us from the first day investments that the only measure of return that really matters is risk adjusted One way we measure this is through alpha Now before we calculate our alpha We must first calculate an expected return for our fund in order to give ourselves a benchmark to compare ourselves to We do this through the capital asset pricing model or cap M Which is taken by taking which is calculated by taking the risk premium in the market and multiplying it by our portfolio beta This is then added to the risk-free rate and gives us an expected return of our fund based on the amount of risk that we chose to take on We then take the difference of the expected return and what our portfolio actually returns in order to arrive at our alpha Our year-to-date alpha for our growth fund is 3.44 percent Two other risk-adjusted measures we use are the sharpen trainer ratios To calculate the sharp ratio you take the return of the portfolio Subtract the risk-free rate and divide that by the standard deviation So for every one unit total risk we were taking on we were getting 2.43 percent return on that Now moving on to the trainer ratio. This is the exact same calculation except dividing by the portfolio's beta This is a measure of the amount of systematic or market risk that we took on and based on this We've been able to generate 19.45 units of return for every one unit of market risk that we chose to take on This is more than three percent of the market and just another testament to the strength of our funds asset allocation this year At the beginning of the semester we were truly playing with fire as our our portfolio was positioned to run with the bulls However, our new portfolio is positioned to fit the current market trends and with that we would like to show you our value performance As you can see our value portfolio has performed in line with mutual funds with similar objectives Also when looking at our benchmark the rustle 1000 value, you can see that we have performed in luck We have beat that as well Looking at our our risk adjusted measures You can see that we've outperformed the rustle 1000 value on both the total and market risk basis looking at our sharpened trainer ratio On top of this we've been able to generate an output of 5.59 percent this year significantly outperforming the index In this measure as well now that we have shared with you our overall performance for our growth and our value fund We'd like to invite up the ad's to discuss grease a little bit This semester our group as in me my two fellow ad's the eight student fund managers You see behind us doc and mrs. Mellon or as we affectionately call our mom doc Got the unique opportunity to travel to Athens grease for eight days For everybody who supported us and future trips We would really love to thank you and we'd also particularly love to thank mr. Hans christenshin for his generosity Without this generosity these trips wouldn't be possible during our trip We visited axia an investment bank as well as the Athens stock exchange and alba graduate university This brought our knowledge of the greek economy as well as european markets in general Now it's important for all these analysts to see the markets on a global aspect as our domestic markets are only so much of what we see It's also important to see that different investors and athletes have different mindsets on where the market's going to be To your end it's and it's important to get the feedback that these basically the analysts have to share with the student fund managers So once again, we'd like to thank everybody who contributed and before we move on to question and answer I just want to show a little love to our eight student fund managers as you saw from our presentation We had a very wild week as we reallocated most of our portfolio And I can't say how proud I am of each and every one of them for putting in the time and work to make this Almost a flawless presentation Especially with the help of dr. Montgomery Invite the student fund managers back up and open up the forward question and answers I have one question. Typically one of these student fund managers will have sort of their chance to update trot and pitch throughout this semester Did any of you guys have a stock that you wish you had purchased earlier in the year or Could convince the rest of your student fund managers to kind of money it on that So one company I absolutely truly love is Boeing One of the reasons why is they're in a market that has extremely high barriers to entry So they're just this massive company and other small competitors Really can't get into with the industry that they're in because they have such high capital expenditures And their order backlogs of about 4500 Especially with oil prices too Increasing their new 787 787 jetliners are going to do super well. We've already seen extreme high demand for them We bought the company probably about two weeks ago three weeks ago And we've already seen a holding period yield of about 10 percent. So I don't know. I love them Extremely excited is fast retailing our market is extremely flooded with retailers. So we decided to go At first student fund managers and I do hesitant about putting it into our fund However, after looking closely at it We put it into our fund and it's already given us a holding period yield of 4 percent in two days The company is absolutely amazing and it's going to take over the world Great job guys. I'm really not hard is, you know, I know firsthand what it's like to kind of, you know, have Everything really fall through the floor and have to have to pick it up in the last hour That's really tough. So I really gotta take my hat to you guys Um on the same on the same note, um, you know, I'm looking at the graph and I see that kind of fall off at the end Um, I know doc breaches the sleep test. Um, you guys talked about stop loss orders You guys had known With the crystal ball, you know that that the that your holdings were going to go ahead and fall like that How would you have kind of readjust your portfolio or maybe, you know, readjust the strategy In the with that So, yes, we did see the tech solve and we really were confident with all of our holdings throughout the entire time Even with this new market sentiment The only thing that I think that we really would have done differently was change our winnings to what we have Done now and change our companies. We were confident the sleep test. Yes. As you guys that aren't alone I know this is what doc has always preached to us that if you can't fall asleep at night thinking about your companies Then you should not be invested in them and we every single day were confident in our funds With that being said with the new shift in sentiment, we're happy with our new allocations I think the only thing we may would have done differently was shift these ratings into our new companies that we hold now a little bit earlier Yeah, I'd also just like to touch on that too. Um, I mentioned like how you know early on in the semester There was skepticism, right? But it was gradual. So like we were seeing earnings plays and we're seeing You know subtle changes and it actually kind of just over time turned to be a repositioning though I don't think there's any way for us to you know, really prepare for it It started gradually and the exact came in one day It was like how do you guys not see this like the markets literally get fall off just because of the repositioning that he was saying Um, so that being said it was very difficult to tell and it's you know, it's tough to Turn away from the impact as we've seen through the past year. So Based on that, you know, it was a little bit difficult for us to be able to determine that But with the fund where it is now we think that we're we'll leverage against the downside So going into 2018 we see some of the same catalysts that are present within this past year So we still see good economic growth as well as emerging markets being a really good player Based on the current evaluations, we're gonna have to wait to see if technology continues to leave the market going to 2018 If there's going to be a new sector that leads the way But certainly we're going to see some of the same catalysts and we do believe that we're moderately moderately bullish on the market as a whole How do you guys handle arguments in that little room?  One of the biggest lessons we talked about earlier Like within ourselves like one of the biggest lessons was working with different opinions I would hate a company other people would absolutely love it We have companies that show like more risk more standard deviation and we would absolutely go at it But you just need to know that we all have different opinions And you need to come together as one and just make sure that you're confident in your holdings Great job. Well presentation I'm pretty curious because in the market, obviously Bitcoin has been a huge topic Everybody's watching the news every day. That's pretty much all it's all about I know that it might not be something that we can invest in Maybe in the future you will be able to put what you take on it and where you see it going How's your own friend tech? Yeah, so bitcoin I want to start uh is a bubble the real technology Real technology uh in order of bitcoin is really blockchain which is the underlying technology The decentralized ledger We're really going to have to see how bitcoin reacts when it goes on the futures market I had to sever 18 because right now it's just a one-way market. It's not shortable And it really just emphasizes a whole high liquidity environment with quantitative easing over the last few years It's pumping in trillions of dollars. It's looking for anywhere to go And it's really just a bandwagon mentality People see it rising. They know it's a bubble, but they see it rising and they want to go in anyway And you know that when people that aren't in the investing world at all start talking about bitcoin You love an uber driver talking about how we just bought bitcoin. That's when you know it's a bubble And it's actually second only to the tool of bubble of the 1600s So prediction for what they come on now? It will crash Uh for the bubble guys, I saw this yesterday and you guys were in a quick time I did have is All the repositioning and hard work you guys put in this semester Is there one company in your fund or funds that you could sweep right now? And if there was one, who would it be? Absolutely not. We are 100% confident Reallocate quickly. We have to do it across many sectors What kind of shopping lists do you guys tend to keep on a daily basis? So when something this happens, you're not scrambling from the things So throughout the entire semester actually the 80s they from our first like tech analysis We take that before we take cafe being alone and I know that They actually compiled an excel spreadsheet where we started looking at companies and throughout the entire semester We had sweeps on deck for stuff like this, you know There's companies that we're constantly we're looking at that We might feel that it was a good fit to reposition ourselves So when we saw it in the market, it was relatively easy for us to know like where we had to go One of the big questions I guess for 2018 is the tax reform So I guess do you think it's going to happen and if it does How's it going to change the corporate landscape in the US? So from a financial perspective, this is something that we followed like extremely closely as you know Like you could see P compression as soon as the media would talk about it You could see earnings being or rather price changes be priced in So this is kind of like one of the plays that we made with PNC Right, so we took our funds or we took our allocation from a city bank Which is diverse by bank higher multiple and we put it into a regional bank because we feel that if tax reform does continue to go through It's given the environment we've seen throughout the year You know, there's minimal spread between yield curves monies in the environment people want to spend it Low interest rate fluctuations like this is all going to be beneficial Especially to a regional bank and they should see explosive balance sheets from this Honestly, just give them given the lending environment that we're supposed to see so we're actually kind of excited It's about the fact that you know, it may be actually going through and again It's been a really good or been really fun. I should say following it. Do we okay? That I know there's a few accounting people in the group. Do you see any downsides in the tax reform? So From from yeah from accounting perspective, um, this is something that doc and I always talked about like us There actually is an accounting major as well. Um, you know, you'll see companies In a sense cooking the books, you know, there's different reporting Principles or fundamentals that they follow So it's going to be interesting to see just given the way that the rates are going to switch How these companies are able to offset what they've been doing especially as we've seen So it's something we definitely have to look at but I think generally we've come to the consensus that it's going to be a pretty positive for all companies going forward I think thermal fisher is a fantastic investment right now They're seeing as we said in the presentation incredible growth in china and on top of this They also provide a lot of services for pharmaceutical companies and they're just pouring money into research and development So that would be one stock but I would suggest I don't know if you haven't you've been following g at all This is something that I think is way too big to fail There is repositioning things. It's all of this and uh, I've followed I try to get this company to give them actions before we saw the price fall off It's a running job I would say to follow it because I really do think it's too big to fail especially for a guy who's working forward Thanks guys, really wonderful job incredible job Some days I've come to I wish I could write them a check Very often it should come away that way But they did a great job I'd also like to say in addition to thanking them I'd like to extend a special thank you to Professor michael melton for his energy and his amazing commitment to this program Experiential learning at roger williams university and of course that's a big part of what we do at this institution And certainly at the gablee school of business For those of you who have not yet been over to our building I hope you will have a chance to visit there before you head out to your dinner or your other activities today a group of people from the Business school and from the university advancement office led by Lisa rayola was with us today. We're very hard To get a new facility developed a new facility and fund that facility for the cafe program For as long as I've been here. I could never understand how all this great work came out of such a small space in our building And it's wonderful that we now have some great new space for the cafe program to work from Hopefully it will be open in the next couple of weeks The construction project has taken longer than we thought But please if you haven't seen the new space make a point of going over and take a look The building's going to be open until five o'clock so you can come in and just look around and Get a take on What our students in the future will experience thanks to the hard work of a lot of people And again, thank you for being here today. There is a reception in the bay view room Which is right down the hallway. I hope you'll be able to stay and visit with us and visit with our Terrific students and thank you again guys for a really fantastic job


I thought of this, yeah, starting over, I forgot to unmute the microphone, so yeah, story up, adventure game framework in Drogdo. This is funny, and let's do that again. Does this work? Yeah. Okay, so starting over from scratch, this adventure game framework in Drogdo. So adventure games anatomy at first. I will focus on what adventure game creators actually need, what do they require in order to create the game, and what do they actually don't want when they are focusing on creating the game itself. Then I'll talk more about this career, introduce it a little bit more, talk about its current status, and what we can do to make it actually better and complete it. So what's an adventure game? Basically, a few elements that you will find in every, in every adventure game, pointing to the adventure games of course. Well, there were a lot of adventure games in the history, so I'll mostly focus on those you can see here. Most of the time you will be playing an animated character, the main player that can move around over a scene, change, go from room to room, et cetera. So basically walks. You can find also items, NPCs to talk with. Those NPCs are of course reacting to actions, actions that you can find here on certain UIs. Sometimes on certain UIs you won't find them, depending on the game, you will find them under the right click to change the actual action to perform on the game objects, such as talking, give up, use, give, et cetera. Other elements that you will find in almost every adventure games, mostly 2D, of course here. Puzzles, using all the items that you will be able to find in the rooms, which means of course having an inventory to keep all these items into your pockets, which is funny because usually your pockets are that big and you could put a whole ship into it. Dialogues of course, as I said, you will meet a lot of people, NPCs to talk with into the games in order to follow the whole history. Which is interesting and it's totally part of the story that you want to tell the player. And also in order to tell a story you will need cutscenes that reward the player as he advances the story of the game, that's what the player is looking for when he advances the game. So first of all, we are talking video games here and it is mostly commonly accepted that video games are no kind of an artistic thing. So we are talking with art, we are working with artists here. What do artists actually need to work on video games like this? First of all, they need to be responsible of the lifetime of the assets. They are actually creating for the game. From the beginning, from the black canvas to the sprite that will be in the actual game. They need no dependency on the programmers. They just want to draw their art, put it in the game and don't ask any programmers. Please can you program update this sprite with the new asset I just created and update it again which needs recompiling all the time. Boring stuff for the artist. They just wanted to be in the game and do not require anything. And of course that's the most important thing.  Of course they will draw all their assets in the dedicated software such as games, such as creators, such as Photoshop, whatever. But they will then export them and put them in the video game directly. Otherwise it stays on their blank page and they are PNG artists. Now that was for the game artists. Now what do game designers need? Those are not the same. These persons are the one who actually write the story and turn it as scripts that make the game work as those scripts are processed and as the scripts are used according to the actions of the player, make the game advance, change the game state and all this kind of stuff. So game designers basically create their story by building rooms using the backgrounds from the artists and they put on this navigable areas to know where the player is able to walk or not. Hot spot areas. This is more some kind of UI stuff but it can serve the story as well since you want to be able to define these areas to be focussable so the player can just look at them but maybe not pick them, use items on them but still not pick them, not push them, et cetera. Items of course, trigger areas. Sometimes in your stories you want to be able to have the player walking in an area and trigger another event and for example, start a cut in NPCs as well. So basically this is accessing the access and influence the game logic but not too much because if you give the game designer too much freedom then first it will be more difficult for him because he will have to manage so many things and he wants to focus on the game logic only, only his story. But still complex enough for him to be able to create and write interesting stories and focus on this. So now, what do game creators in general don't want to mess with? First of all, I believe that they don't want you to care about the UI. You know, I mean they need to care about the UI because they want to know what it will look like. They want to change the theme, they want to place it on the screen, they want to define its basic behavior but in an adventure game you have the inventory, you have all the dialogues, the verbs actions that you can find on the UI. But they should be already done and the game designer should only define their look, not their actual behavior, what it does behind the scenes. It's not interesting for him. So only define their appearance, even truly special behaviors, rest it's too technical. So they want to care about how characters actually move. Movement of the characters is some kinds that can, it's a very specific task to be managed in the game engine. Nowadays, game engines can deal with this pretty easily with a lot of techniques. You can have path findings, stuff, navigation, whatsoever. So the easiest manner for the game designer to do this is to just define the areas, the walkable areas and that's all. Also the same for the animations. They want to define the animations and forget about them. Create them, name them, call them, call them by scripts of course, but don't manage the way the animations are actually started in the engine. Don't manage their timings. This is creating the animation but don't manage this between the timing of the animation and the timing of all the management of all the events of the game and so on. There are a lot of stuff like this I didn't talk about sound, for example. So we are talking about a Godot framework here. So Godot doesn't provide, doesn't Godot provide already all the stuff you require to do this? Like sprites, animated sprites, animation player to do the animations. So everything's okay. JD script, which allows you to create your scripts, scripts your game, manage the inputs of the player. Everything's fine, but it's already too low level for the creators so we need more simplicity. And that's the purpose of Ischoria. So what is Ischoria? Ischoria is currently in its current state a set of tools and script, mostly scripts that are built on top of Godot and they define a basic workflow. That means the scripts are here and you will, as a game creator, we just have to put them on your nodes and that's all. And after that you will have to use another way to script your game logic. It's meant to be a tool for teams, artists in one hand, game designers in the other hand and it's built on top of it in order to forget about the programmation stuff. It's already done for you. So it's a collection of scripts, as I said, to apply Godot scenes and nodes. Then about the scripting part that allows you to, I actually make your action, the actions that you will see, the dialogues as well. These kind of things that you can have here, those are the actions, look, use. This would be a script that you could put on a red bed. I put a commentary, item red bed, for example. So the action look basically makes the player to say, oh, a nice red bed, fine. And also another action, if you want to action verb use on this red bed, the player would just say something else. In the same way, you will have a lot of commands in this scripting language to allow you to add the object in your inventory, use the object on another object and manage this using states. This is not exactly the purpose of this presentation because that's the way it works. And this is not meant to be changed. It already works. The nice thing about Xcoria is that it already cares about all the stuff I said before. The game's elements are, the game's elements and the managers, everything works, items, navigations, animations. You can already forget it because it basically already works. Just to show you a game that's already using Xcoria, a professional game that was out in 2016. This game is the Interactive Adventures of the Mendoza and Pizzaboy, which started development in May 2012. It's a classic point-and-click gameplay, basically, so it just fits the purpose of the other framework. It was made by only six person, then 12 in total, so Xcoria was actually created during the development of this game in particular. It was a Kickstarter and the game was signed to the publisher. The idea was to release Xcoria as free software under MIT license after the game was actually released, which it was. So that's good, but that's not enough. We have to know that Xcoria was written already a long time ago. It was written under Godot Engine 1.X, if I'm not wrong, and now Godot is just version 3.2 since two or three days. And a lot of things happened in this period of time. A lot of features made their appearance in the engine, such as editor plugins and just to name one, but not only this. Problem is that Xcoria's maintenance is not very easy because the backend scripts that make the whole framework work are very big. It's a whole load of script, and it's not easy for someone like me who arrived after the development of this game. I wasn't the developer of neither Xcoria nor Documentosa game. I arrived just after when the framework was released, and it's really difficult to dive into this base of code. So actually you can run some music, run animations, modify game states, but it's made of hacks almost everywhere to just tweak some problems that you can find because of some Godot bugs. You can have this in labels, for example. It's very difficult to use. In my opinion, I need more flexibility. Currently, if you want to make an actual scene, this is a scene which you would call a room in another tool, for example. So basically a background with the wall cable areas. You have the background here, you have the terrain, and this terrain node is actually the wall cable area. And all the other elements here are basically sprites, other game elements. The players here, you put everything in this way, but certain elements such as the background and the terrain are mandatory. And the fact is those names need to be in the right order in the century, so background needs to be in first, terrain just after. They need to have this very name. This is not very flexible, so this must change in order to let the creator make all the things the way he wants it to be. Because of this, it's hard to add new features. Some new features have been added in the past few months such as the shadows under the characters. We're speaking 2D shadows here. You can also have lights in your backgrounds and one of our users wanted a feature so that lights actually had an impact on the shadows under the player. Usually shadows are just part of the sprites and that's all. He wanted something to be more dynamic, which was difficult so we just had to find something, but again, this is very hacky to me. So what are my goals in order to evolve this Korea in its current state? First of all, simplify the usability. It's already very easy to use, but you basically have to read the manual. A great manual has already been written by Floss Manuals, which you can find on the internet for free. It's a great example of a game, of a point-and-click game that you're able to do with it. Keep it as simple as possible and maintain in order to appeal more people to add new features, fixed bugs, because there are bugs, not only Godot bugs, but also Scoria bugs. But also, of course, don't make it a new adventure game studio or a visionary under Godot. In order to make this, the idea is to make Scoria an editor plugin. Making this will enable us to integrate Scoria directly into the editor, and also enable us to create new tools, such as an Scoria scripting editor, so you will be able to write your Scoria scripts directly into Godot, which is not possible currently, and also all sorts of ideas that you can have here, for example. Also, another idea I had, a custom user script to add new functionality without having to edit the actual Scoria source code. This is Scoria, a whole bunch of scripts in one folder named Global. As you can imagine, this is a pain. So I wanted to look more like this, more homogene with the different folders. Basically, it's sorting all the source code, but it also means reorganizing the functions into the scripts, which is a lot of works. This has impacts on the relationship between the user scene and the Scoria. So basically, I need to make them a little bit more smarter and try to guess what the game creator wanted to do when he created his scene. I'm trying to go a little bit faster because I took a little too much time, but to be very simple, I only want the user nodes, the scenes that the user created to have two tasks only. Receive user inputs and emit them to Scoria. Scoria manages them, does his stuff, and gives back those nodes actual actions to perform, such as move the node, play animation on the node, and that's all. Currently, you can see some game logic... Yeah, you can see some game logic inside the scripts that are currently in those scripts, which is not something we want. And to finish on this, the example scenes. Currently, Scoria comes with a few example scenes, which are crappy. Actually, this is the only one. I started something over, but yeah, we want definitely something different. So in order to do this, well, basically we'll make it from scratch. This means make multiple demo scenes showing different features of Scoria. That can be animation in the background, one scene, side scrolling, another scene. This way, if one room, one example room is able to showcase only one feature at the time, it's easier for the users to dive into Scoria and use it. And of course, make it a little bit more beautiful, because if I see this for the first time, I'd run away. So yeah, that's the basic idea. Of course, this is a lot of work. That's a lot of work, and it has just started. I should have started this a few times ago, but yeah, life, open source, this kind of stuff. So there is no working branch yet. It will happen soon. If you already have used Scoria, if you're already using Scoria, expect some competitive breakage everywhere, because it will basically change completely. But in this time, by starting from scratch, I'm reintegrating all the existing source code, cleaning it, removing all bugs, all hacks, portion by portion in order to have it working the exact same way as before. So it's transparent, but it will be totally changed behind the scenes. So of course, no estimated date of delivery. So for those of you who are already working, waiting for Godot, that's one more thing to wait for. So what you can do currently, just to finish on this, you can drop by an IRC. I'm usually idling on Godot Engine Scoria. There are some people who are idling there as well. So you can share your ideas and suggestions. This is the Scoria repository. It's on the official Godot Engine account, since it was related in a certain fashion with Godot. And if you have any IDE suggestions, you can also drop them on a filing issue in there. That's it. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions. So do we have plans for HTML5 exports? Actually, this is not exactly related with Scoria itself. This is more a Godot question to be honest. There are plans about HTML if I'm not wrong. We have a paid contributor who's currently working on WebExports. I'm not really aware of the current status of this, but this will change since we have some people working on this. Yeah, about the threads and management in the web browsers. Again, the same answer, unfortunately, I'm sorry. This is not exactly the purpose of Scoria itself, even though it's, of course, obviously it's using threads, but this will have to be tested. I don't know the current status of WebExports right now with Scoria nor with Godot Engine itself because I'm not using it myself yet. So I have difficulties to answer your questions. But if you drop by at the Godot stance, maybe somebody will be more able to answer your question. Yes? Yeah, so about the Android compatibility and all the widgets that you can use on Android applications, that's something I have in mind, indeed, to make it work with Android and mobile devices as well. That's important because in my opinion, indeed, that's a platform that suits very well these kind of adventure games. So, yeah, that's something I have in mind and I will try to work on Android experts as well to make it work and also ease the game developer work to provide him with already, since already made for him so that they fit for mobile platforms. Yeah, other questions? All right, thanks a lot.