NYU Stock-Pickers Beat Growth and Value Benchmarks

This article was written by Stockpickr member Ira Krakow.

Last month, we saw how the Michael Price Student Investment Fund (MPSIF) at the New York University Stern School of Business was able to sift through the third-quarter earnings noise and stick to its investment strategies. Here is an end-of-semester rundown of how the MPSIF's growth and value student managers beat their benchmarks .

MPSIF Growth Fund: Up 9.7%

The MPSIF's growth fund, run by Ryan Fiftal, returned 9.7% between Aug. 31 and Nov. 30, beating the fund's benchmark, the Russell 1000 Growth Index, which returned a mere 3.7% during the same period. Fiftal attributes the growth fund's success predominantly to "good stock-picking." Fiftal says, "Our underweighting of financials was an excellent call."

Here are the growth fund's recent buys and sells:

Sold: DeVry DV: Originally purchased on April 4 for $28.41 per share, the MPSIF growth team sold its stake in the education company on Nov. 7 for $57.77 per share.

Fiftal explains: "We sold [DeVry based] on valuation . The stock more than doubled since we purchased it, which was well in excess of our initial price target. Our thesis that DeVry is a great play on the growth of online vocational training was confirmed by the market. We did not want to be greedy."

Bought: Tessera Technologies TSRA: On Dec. 3, Fiftal and his team invested into the semiconductor company for $39.14 per share.

Fiftal's reasoning: "Tessera is not a semiconductor manufacturer per se. Instead, it licenses its intellectual properties for a royalty. By doing that, Tessera's business model is insulated from the price wars of the semiconductor manufacturers, such as Intel INTC and Advanced Micro Devices AMD. Our price target of $51 was based on a discounted cash flow model."

Bought: BlackRock BLK: On Nov. 26, shares of the investment management firm with $1.3 trillion of assets under management were added to the MPSIF's growth fund for $190.15 per share.

Fiftal recalls: "We liked BlackRock's recent growth and performance in spite of difficult conditions in the financial space. Our analyst was impressed with how smoothly BlackRock's merger with Merrill Lynch Asset Management progressed. In spite of Merrill Lynch's recent writedowns, we felt that asset management companies are more stable than investment banks and brokerage firms . Our analyst used a combination of PEG [price/earnings-to-growth] analysis, with expectations of superior growth compared to peers such as T. Rowe Price Group TROW and Legg Mason LM, and discounted cash flow analysis to arrive at a price target of $231."