Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, about 15 students enter Ballentine Hall, Room 103 at the University of Rhode Island for The Ram Fund class. In a typical classroom, the students settle down, open up their notebooks and patiently wait for the professor to start his or her lecture. However, the Ram Fund class is a bit different.

The Ram Fund is an investment portfolio managed by College of Business Administration students. Now in its 15th year, the fund has tripled in value. The work is done by students enrolled in the class taught by Dennis McLeavey, professor emeritus of finance and fellow instructor Deborah Imondi who is the executive director at Rhode Island 4-H Club Foundation, Inc. and URI business alumna B.S. ’83, M.B.A. ’86. The students work at computers with their assigned teams and discuss their decision-making processes and goals with each other and the instructors.

Established in 2001 with funding of $100,000 from the Alumni Association, the program’s goal was to give advanced business students the preparation and experience needed to excel in the investment world. As a part of the Ram Fund class, students were given the opportunity to invest and manage money while also practicing presentation and portfolio management. Originally, the class was only open to finance majors, but as the program became more successful, more students from other business majors applied for and won spots in the class.

As far as tripling the value of the Ram Fund, this was not something that happened overnight. McLeavey explained that “each semester students are buying and selling securities so they do a lot of fundamental analysis. Looking for value stocks, in a quantitative value process, it is an actively managed fund. We manage against a completion index giving us the market except for the S&P 500 as a benchmark. So there wasn’t one exact decision that tripled the fund. It was years of carefully calculated analysis that allowed students to increase the fund.”

Read more on URI Today and Providence Business News