HBCU Students: Apply Here for Access to Free Textbooks

Textbooks are just one of the many expenses that fall on college students and their families in addition to tuition and, oftentimes, dormitories, meal plans, and more. According to a recent study, textbook costs are the second-largest stressor facing college students after paying for tuition. The study also found that 60% of African American students noted did not buy required textbooks and course materials because of the high costs.

To help ease the financial burden of higher education–an epidemic that disproportionately affects students of colors–the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and Cengage have partnered to provide 1,000 students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) with access to textbooks. Through this new initiative, Cengage, an education and technology company, is giving select students free semester-long subscriptions to its first-of-its-kind digital subscription service for college textbooks and course materials.

Cengage Unlimited subscriptions, which is essentially like the “Netflix-for-textbooks,” offers access to more than 22,000 eBooks, online homework access codes, study guides, and tools like Chegg, Kaplan, and Quizlet. It normally costs $119.99 a semester. However, eligible students will gain access to the subscription at no charge. To apply for the program, HBCU students must be of African descent, obtain a 2.5 GPA or better, demonstrated a financial need, and submit an essay and letter of recommendation.

“Every student should have an equal opportunity to succeed, and having the right learning materials can have a critical impact on performance,” said Michael Hansen, the CEO of Cengage, in a statement. “The high cost of textbooks have prohibited this for many students. This is why we launched Cengage Unlimited – to make quality learning more affordable.

UNCF, the largest educational organization supporting and advocating for minorities, will administer the program and select the recipients on behalf of Cengage. Ultimately, the UNCF-Cengage partnership aims to combat the disparities in education and help improve college affordability by an overhaul of outdated models.

“For 75 years, our motto ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a wonderful thing to invest in,’ has remained at the forefront of everything we do,” said Dr. Michael L. Lomax, the president and CEO of UNCF. “We must continue to invest our time and money in better futures for young people around the country. Partners like Cengage are vitally important to this work and we are pleased to have them as an ally in helping to educate the next generation of leaders.”

Applications are being accepted through August 29 for the fall semester. Applications for the Spring 2020 semester will open on November 4, 2019. Students can learn more and apply here.

 

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Sunday's Best Deals: Instant Pot Accessories, Wayfair, Sony Headphones, and More

Wayfair’s 48-Hour Clearout, an Instant Pot accessories deal, and discounted Oakley sunglasses lead off Sunday’s best deals from around the web.

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Suzanne Shank’s Strategic Moves and Billion-Dollar Transactions Made Her Firm Among Wall Street’s Most Successful

Led by Suzanne Shank, multiple strategic moves are taking place at Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co., one of the largest black-owned investment banks in the country. Shank’s leadership is positoning the firm as an even more powerful player in the nation’s investment banking world.

As the company’s CEO and chairwoman, Shank has refitted SCS over the past decade. With dual headquarters in New York and Oakland, California, SCS is the top-ranked women-owned and minority-owned Wall Street firm along with the No. 1 minority and women-owned business enterprise senior-managing underwriter of municipal new issuance. The company is also on this year’s “BE 100s” list of America’s largest black-owned businesses.

[VIEW THE COMPLETE 2019 LIST OF THE NATION’S LARGEST BLACK-OWNED BUSINESSES]

Says Shanks: “Coming off of 2018, where we ranked second nationally among all firms as managing underwriters of negotiated municipal bonds, shows evidence of our strong sales and underwriting capabilities and the high regard the firm holds among both issuers and investors.”

Beyond public finance, SCS has expanded its footprint in corporate finance, participating in 198 debt and equity transactions since November 2015 for corporations such as Walmart, Delta, Comcast, and McDonald’s—deals valued at more than $517 billion.

SCS expects total U.S. municipal issuance to fall slightly in 2019, down 5% from last year. Shank says the elimination of advance refunding tax-exempt bonds as a result of tax reform legislation and the lack of a cohesive federal infrastructure initiative continue to suppress market volume.

Suzanne Shank

At SCS, Shank has publicly stated her firm plans to reach for even greater heights in 2019. As such, it has taken several steps recently to boost revenue and fee income by diversifying and expanding its operations. Those moves include:partnering with Henry Cisneros, the former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary under President Bill Clinton, to help SCS fund the nation’s fast-decaying infrastructure via American Triple I Partners L.L.C. An SCS stakeholder, Cisneros is working with principals to launch the new infrastructure investment firm.

She has also brought aboard other top-flight talent like former New York City Comptroller and one-time New York City mayoral candidate William Thompson and Wall Street veteran John Rhea. And SCS Equity Partner Gary Hall last year became the first African American chairman of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board. The MSRB is the top regulator that supervises the nation’s multitrillion-dollar municipal securities market.

Over the years, SCS has had significant growth in the Lone Star state. In fact, last year the firm was ranked fifth as senior manager for negotiated Texas transactions with more than $1.8 billion in par amount.

Shank says her firm has also been buoyed through increased deal flow from major corporations accessing debt and equity markets. For instance, the firm participated in both the $8.1 billion Uber and $2.6 billion Lyft IPOs.

 

 

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Mellody Hobson: Shining A Light on Momentum Investing

Since 2013, the FAANG stocks—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (a.k.a. Google)—have grabbed headlines, and for good reason. In the past five years, this collection of tech behemoths has seen their stock prices shoot up anywhere from 121% to 663%. These five companies have a combined market cap of nearly $3.3 trillion. The extent to which they have reshaped the way we live is hard to overstate.But it is not just our lives that they have shaken up. Their recent stock performance can also help us understand a phenomenon called momentum investing.

John Waggoner of InvestmentNews.com best defined this strategy when he wrote, “In its simplest form, momentum simply means buying whatever is going up the most, and selling it when it loses steam.” Put another way, momentum measures how much a stock’s price has gone up or down relative to others over some time period—typically 12 months. Investors who embrace this approach operate under the premise that stocks that have performed well recently will sustain their positive trajectory, while those that have fared poorly over the same period will continue to do so.

When it comes to the momentum approach: the value of a stock is not solely determined based on the company’s underlying fundamentals. Instead, behavioral psychology plays a significant role. Recency bias causes people to expect recent performance will continue indefinitely. As a result, investors anchor to past stock prices, rather than adjusting based on a company’s fundamentals. Overreaction then follows, as the cycle becomes self-reinforcing and herd mentality takes over. Finally, confirmation bias—our desire to favor information that confirms our own beliefs—leads us to continue to support the trend, regardless of what the full data set is telling us. Together, these behavioral biases can lead investors to stray too far from traditional performance metrics and put themselves at the mercy of the crowd.

Indeed, while momentum can do well over sustained periods of time, there are inflection points whereby its performance can reverse dramatically and wipe out entire years of gains. Because momentum investing can get swept up in mania, there are considerable downside risks. As the famed value investor Howard Marks notes in his new book, “What’s the greatest source of investment risk? . . . [I]t comes when asset prices attain excessively high levels as a result of some new intoxicating rationale that can’t be justified on the basis of fundamentals and that causes unreasonably high valuations to be assigned.” None of this a critique of FAANG companies. They are incredibly successful businesses. But their recent market success shines a light on an investing strategy that can harm investors who have a fear of missing out. Remember, momentum does not only go in one direction.

 

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Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi, Who Lied His Way Into A Browns Tryout, Scored A Return Touchdown In His NFL Debut

Late in Cleveland’s preseason win over Washington last night, rookie return specialist Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi fielded a punt and zipped mostly untouched, 86 yards, all the way to the opposite end zone. Despite the inherent meaninglessness of the game and the already gaudy scoreline, Sheehy-Guiseppi’s Browns teammates…

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