In her college investment class, Dayna Marshall had a tough time convincing classmates that Eli Lilly and Company was a good choice for their investment portfolio.

“They shut me down. We’d plugged it into the valuation model and everyone said it was overvalued,” said Marshall, a senior at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “But for me, I wasn’t just looking at the valuation model. … I was looking at their growth and what their plans were for the future, what new products they were coming out with.”

With its new weight-loss drug Zepbound, Eli Lilly became Marshall’s top health care pick for the Coyote Fund, her team’s investment portfolio. Her argument persuaded her team to make it 2% of the fund. 

“It was our top performer at 17.4% return,” in a few short months, Marshall said Wednesday, after presenting the results to their client, MSU Denver Foundation. “It carried our portfolio.” 

The Coyote Fund wasn’t just a student project or imaginary money. The money is 100% real. The nonprofit foundation, which provides scholarships and other support to the school, allocated $100,000 to the course five years ago. Marshall’s class was the 11th semester of finance students tackling investing with real dough, learning in real time.

Since the first group of students got hold of the six-figure sum in January 2020 — two months before COVID-19 disruptions in Colorado — the student-managed funds are up 93.8%, or 20 percentage points higher than the Russell 3000 Index, which tracks the 3,000 largest publicly traded companies. 

That provided this year’s class more than $190,000 to invest this semester.

“From an investment standpoint, we’re extremely happy with the returns,” said Christine Márquez-Hudson, executive director of the MSU Denver Foundation. “But equally and more importantly, the students have gained incredibly valuable skills that will serve them in their careers.”

Having real money to manage during a college course on investment isn’t unheard of. Márquez-Hudson said they had looked at similar programs at other schools and felt it was worthwhile to invest in students in such a fiscal way. An accountability system was set up in case “things started to go way south” and the board could take back the resource. But that has never come close to happening, she said.

Of course, the current semester’s class was one of the most chaotic and unpredictable markets ever. There is even a Wikipedia entry for the 2025 stock market crash on April 2, when President Donald Trump announced a new round of double-digit tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners. 

The semester included multiple starts and stops of U.S. tariffs, along with the loss of federal government jobs, the end of multiple federal grant commitments and the administration’s multiple expense cuts to tackle the nation’s massive debt. All contributed to an anxious time for investors — and the students.

The Coyote Fund was down 9.8% from its first investment in February, performing slightly worse than the Russell 3000 index, which was down 9.3% in the same period. A second team of students behind the Roadrunner Fund (named after the school’s mascot) fared a bit better, and was down 6.4%.

“You kind of learn to detach your emotions from the stocks you pick, which is really a good thing in finance,” said Julio Astacio, a student on the Roadrunner team. “You want to be more into the fundamentals. If the fundamentals make sense, then it’s still a good company to invest in.”

One of Team Roadrunner’s top returns was Newmont Corp., a Denver gold mining company, which was up 11.8%. 

“Whenever the market’s down, people are going to invest in gold,” said Diego Lorenzo, a senior majoring in finance. “Another thing, we wanted to do a 90-10 ratio, which was 90% here in the U.S. and 10% international. Newmont is based here but has mining all over the world.”

Dylan Romanow, also a senior majoring in finance, picked the stock after a lot of research into which gold company is worth their investment. 

“Newmont is really focused on their high-margin mines and something that’s going to produce long term,” he said. “Their commitment to long-term growth and tier one assets is what made us go OK. They’re not just thinking about today but the future.”

Turbulent times are a great time to learn about investment strategy and sticking to it, said Adam Schor, who taught the class and recently retired from NZS Capital, a finance firm in Denver.

“It’s far more valuable to make mistakes than to just think you’re perfect,” Schor said. “Everyone’s a genius in a bull market, as they say. And in a market like this, or a choppier market, you need to really understand and have conviction. It’s much harder, but more valuable to have a stock that you believe in go down, and buy more, and learn from that than just to think you have a Midas touch.”

But it was still a little scary to be making decisions that would impact a customer’s actual account, said Nicholas Pratt, who was on Team Coyote. 

“The Coyote Fund started out with $120,000 and we thought that putting 5% into (each stock) was a bit intimidating because that’s around $6,000 to $7,000 a stock that we’re betting on, which is more like a hedge fund type of deal,” Pratt said. “That’s why we invested in Cummins and then doubled down.”

Cummins Inc., a diesel engine manufacturer based in Indiana, ended up being one of the fund’s worst performers. Teammate Colton West had analyzed Cummins and found that its equipment was being used to power data centers, which are getting more attention these days as development in artificial intelligence technology expands. 

“Cummins consistently went down almost from the moment we bought it,” Pratt said. “We thought that Trump was going to stop his tariffs and we were going to get it at a discount and then it was going to go back up. But then Trump doubled down on his tariffs, which sent it into a spiral. He didn’t pause anything on China and that’s where a lot of their stuff comes from.”

In another semester, perhaps the stock would have fared better. “But because of the tariffs, it just never recovered,” he said. 

The Cummins stock had a negative return of 19.5%. 

The tariffs actually lifted the price of Eli Lilly because the pharmaceutical company already had manufacturing in the U.S. and committed to even more in February. 

“I knew this was a good thing for Eli Lilly. That means their stock is going to go up because they don’t have that supply constraint like every other health company,” said Marshall, who said the experience gave her confidence and she’s changed her career goals to find a similar role. “I should have gone back and bought even more.”

The two funds will be liquidated, as they always are, before a new class gets their chance to manage them. 

“The fact that we have to sell it all before the next group is just a dynamic of the class,” Schor said. “It’s inconsistent with our (long-term) investment policy but it’s just what happens when you lose students every semester.”  

The foundation is committed to keeping the student funds, Márquez-Hudson said. They have different goals and assets than the foundation’s other investments, so you can’t compare them. 

But, she added, “I think the students have done better than our professionally managed investment returns.”