Tucked away on West Campus lies the E.L. Wehner building, which hosts a state-of-the-art trade room for business and finance students to get hands-on investment experience. 

Every Thursday evening, select members of the Aggie Investment Club, or AIC, meet to invest and manage an equity fund that has grown from $50,000 to $70,000. The group has managed to beat the market in its 25 years of operating, but more importantly it has kick-started the careers of many young professionals looking for experience in  the finance industry.

The club’s current president, finance junior David Rabalais, boasted of the club’s claim to fame as the oldest and largest investment club on campus.

“We have about 250 members that can be divided into two main sections,” Rabalais said. “We have general weekly meetings with all the members and the finance development program, which is for members who are new to finance and want to learn the foundations of investing. … The other part is the equity fund.”

Rabalais said the primary mission of the organization is to kickstart careers.

“We are here to help Aggies break into the world of finance,” Rabalais said. “Historically, finance is very selective. … It’s hard to get into these closed-door organizations because they prefer to recruit from other universities. At AIC, we want to take members who have zero background knowledge but ambitious goals, and we give them the resources, tools and education to help them.”

The club’s vice president, finance junior Juan Jose Vivanco, emphasized that experience is not essential to joining the club and said that many members start out knowing next to nothing about the investment industry.

“I didn’t know a single thing,” Vivanco said. “It was just a welcoming organization where everyone learns from each other. A lot of the older members give back to the underclassmen, a lot of people partake in high-impact programs … and come back to give knowledge to those who are just starting out.”

AIC offers helpful programs and events to its members including outreach and trips to large cities in Texas.

“We visit hedge funds, venture capital firms, the Texas teacher’s retirement system, investment banks and private equity shops,” Vivanco said. “We also bring in a lot of speakers, many of which are Aggies who were in AIC, and they talk about what they learned, how things have changed and what they did in their careers.”

The group has a yearly meeting with its founder, Bryan Farney ‘06, who still keeps in contact with members 25 years later. Currently, AIC is trying to expand their alumni network to create business opportunities for members.

“There’s been thousands of Aggies that have gone through Aggie Investment Club,” Rabalais said. “If you search for well-known firms, most of the Aggies there were in Aggie Investment Club. … We can’t take full credit, but I would say there is a common thread that the world’s finest were in AIC.”

Rabalais praised the special connection between the upper and lower classmen in AIC, noting that they foster a healthy learning environment for those starting their finance journey.

“The upperclassmen are a hidden gem of the organization,” Rabalais said. “ … You can only learn so much from finance classes and on your own, but if you have people who have already gone through these experiences before it makes the learning curve exponentially easier.”

Finance senior Tori Garza is the longest-tenured member of Aggie Investment Club, being involved in all eight semesters she’s spent at Texas A&M. As such, she’s witnessed many ways that the club has adapted over the years.

“In the beginning of my freshman year, a lot of meetings weren’t mandatory,” Garza said. “Involvement is a lot more important now, and I think it’s a big part of why we’ve grown in the past four years. … I’d say we’re also more organized and structured now that we have the finance development program, general meetings and the equity fund.”

According to Garza, the club now provides a platform for the inclusion of female voices in the finance space.

“When I first came to an AIC meeting, it was a room full of men with one other girl there,” Garza said. “I can now say throughout the last four years, we’ve recruited about 50 girls. Seeing that progression — not just for the org, but as a woman in finance at A&M — is really great to see.”

Finance sophomore Kiyan Phelps, AIC’s chief investment officer and head of securities analysis workshops, gathers data and news to be shared at general meetings. Because investment is heavily tied to politics and current events, he has to be diligent to keep members informed.

“We’re talking about tariffs and deportation, which are big staples of the Trump administration,” Phelps said. “These are controversial topics. … We gather info from many different sources and we present it with an unbiased view … and try to present it to our members through a finance lens.”

Because these topics are interconnected with finance and have huge ramifications on investment decisions, there is a lot of pressure to make the information easy to understand for those new to the investment world, according to Garza.

“We present these high-level topics and break them down and interpret them into something helpful,” Garza said. “We have to deliver something digestible, especially because freshmen make up a large majority of our org.”

Phelps says the organization’s equity fund program was introduced last year and has allowed students to get hands-on experience investing and managing money, and is unique as the first student-managed single fund at A&M.

“Equity fund runs quite differently than the ones managed by professors in a classroom setting,” Phelps said. “We’re allowed to meet and pitch ideas whenever. We have roughly 30-ish members involved with the equity fund. … We look for students interested in investing, who are open-minded to learning and willing to put in the time it takes to help manage the fund.”

The fund’s growth in the past year is impressive, and it is managing to grow to a level that surpasses that of professionals.

“More than half of professional money managers don’t beat the market,” Vivanco said. “We’re able to do that as 30 undergraduate students. … It’s really cool because you would think it’s all highly intellectual, but in the meetings it’s just people sitting and talking about the world around them.”

It’s not entirely business meetings and investment pitches, though. Like most student organizations, an emphasis is also put on providing a community and support group for its members, Phelps said.

“We are a professional organization, but there’s a large social aspect, too,” Phelps said. “We do a lot of socials and just go hang out together almost every weekend. It’s a great way to meet people older than you in a non-professional setting.”

AIC is hoping to catch the attention of students and faculty outside the organization with a new program.

“We are hosting a campus-wide stock pitch competition this April,” Rabalais said. “Anyone at A&M can apply to compete in it. … We have a cash prize of $1,500, anyone can do it regardless of investing background. … If it goes well, we hope to expand it to the first-ever intercollegiate stock pitch competition.”

In the typically cutthroat world of finance, the members of AIC feel compelled to lift each other up rather than compete for top spots.

“Whenever we get someone who enters a good firm or a field that we haven’t gotten into yet, they send it into the chat and everyone celebrates and talks about it,” Vivanco said. “We never compete against each other, and it’s really to the benefit of the entire club, Mays Business School and the university.”