Eric Lundeen, University of Colorado at Boulder, MBA '10, provided the following synopsis of his summer internship. Read though to hear about his trip with Ball Corp execs on a PJ!
Ah... so a summary of what I am doing this summer...
I am the treasury intern for Ball Corporation, which is a large (7.6 billion dollar revenue) Broomfield, CO based public company that produces, metal beverage and food containers, aerosol containers, plastic containers, avionics and space systems (satellites).
I am working for the Corporate Treasurer and Senior Director of treasury. The main areas that I am gaining exposure to are: hedging against the company's foreign currency exchange rate risk, interest rate risk (for payments on their corporate bonds), commodity price hedging (locking in aluminum prices at the right time) and dealing with the asset allocation of the companies $600M pension investment fund.
I have been stretched in this role as I have very little background and experience in the financial markets (such as portfolio allocation, derivatives investing, commodities futures, etc), but rather in accounting and internal corporate planning and analysis. I have been asked to figure out how to update their approach to asset allocation model given the recent increased swings in the equity markets. I am researching Post Modern Portfolio Theory and I think this may be an approach that solves the issue they want to address. Of course, to understand "post modern" I am learning "modern" first.
Last week, Ball Corp was finalizing the deal to make a ~$600 million acquisition. As part of this transaction they are going to issue bonds. They wanted to make sure the acquisition news didn't result in a downgrade of the firms credit rating prior to the bond issue (otherwise they'd have to pay a higher interest rate on the bonds) so the company sent the CFO, treasurer and senior director of treasury to NY city to meet with Moody's and S&P credit rating agencies. Since I had done some pre work on the bond they invited me to join them on the trip. The best part was that they took the company's jet and I got to spend three hours each way with some of the top execs of the company. We flew out of the airport in Broomfield in the morning, had meetings during the day in the city, grabbed a beer a block from the world trade center and then flew out in time for a late dinner back home in boulder.
It was very surreal, the private jet was fun, but the exposure to the execs and sitting in on these high level meetings was amazing!
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