Image: U.S. Steel February 26, 2021
ERIE, Pa. In January, when the deal closed, U.S. Steel executives positioned the company’s acquisition of Big River Steel as a “best of both” integration a $774 million blending of traditional steelmaking and LEED-certified, Flex Mill manufacturing.
The student members of Penn State Behrend’s CFA Institute Research Challenge Team said they saw it differently.
“It’s too little, too late,” said Joshua Kirkpatrick, a senior from Pittsburgh.
He and his teammates Evan Briant, Michael Fedorek, Simon Nero and Michael Tejchman spent months studying U.S. Steel, a Pittsburgh-based Fortune 250 company. On Feb. 24, at the opening round of the CFA Institute student challenge, they were given 10 minutes to convince a panel of financial analysts that the company is overvalued at $13.60 per share.
A band of Reddit investors pushed the price of GameStop's stock from $17 to $483. Then the bottom fell out. Greg Filbeck, director of the Black School of Business and the Samuel P. Black III Professor of Finance and Risk Management at Penn State Behrend, said there are lessons to be learned from what happened.