Over its first year, the Terry College of Business Student Managed Investment Fund’s Arch Bond Fund grew a little less than 1% (in line with the U.S. Aggregate Bond market index). But the real gains were the experience of building something new and watching it grow.
“The most rewarding part of the experience was everything we learned while building the fund from the ground up,” said Patrick Ingalls, Arch Bond Fund founding co-president and one of three executive team members who helped build the fund’s infrastructure. “We had the unique opportunity to create something entirely new, while already having the Athena Stock Fund to work with. Building Arch from its foundation was both intellectually challenging and without question one of the most meaningful experiences of my time at UGA.”
The fund was established in 2025 with $1 million from the UGA Foundation, $250,000 from Bay Point Advisors and $200,000 of a five-year, $1 million commitment from Angel Oak Capital Advisors.
Comprised of volunteer professionals and investment executives, the Arch Bond Fund Advisory Board is available to guide student managers in their decision-making.
Co-presidents Ingalls and David Giardi and founding portfolio manager Leon Cohen, who all graduated in May, started working with SMIF advisor Johannes Kohler during their junior year to build the structure allowing the Arch Bond Fund’s 33 student managers to allocate the $1.45 million.
Each week, students pitched two assets and members voted on whether to invest, with the goal of creating a diverse bank of assets that would outperform the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.
“We would have teams come in and pitch two different securities in the same industry, so students could get more exposure to what they’re focusing on when they vote,” Giardi said. “Also, if you have to build out a diversified bond portfolio, which can have thousands of securities, we needed to get the ball rolling to start allocating capital.”
For students such as Ingalls and Giardi, who came into Terry knowing they wanted to work in securities after graduation, the Arch Bond Fund provided needed exposure to credit markets and fixed-income investments.
“All (many students) think about is investment banking, private equity or maybe sales and trading,” Giardi said. “But credit markets are way bigger than equity markets, and there are a lot more jobs in credit markets. So, if the fund grows enough where students are more aware of fixed-income investing and ready for those jobs when they get out of Terry, then that would be huge.”
This fall, while Giardi, Ingalls and Cohen are in their new roles as investment analysts at Canaccord Genuity, Truist and Goldman Sachs, respectively, a new executive team takes over, and a new class of bond fund managers will continue the process of building out the fund.
The founding executive team can’t wait to see how it grows.
“(The fund) is still work in progress now, and it’s going to keep progressively getting better as the students keep making changes,” Ingalls said. “I know that the leadership team for this year already has some great ideas that they’re putting in motion.
“Twenty years from now, it will be exciting to return to campus for a football weekend and see how far the fund has come. I am eager to have conversations with the students managing it in the future and share stories with them about where it all began. Knowing that something we built will continue to create opportunities for future generations is incredibly rewarding.”