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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provided funds to 25 universities in its service region for the establishment of student-managed investment funds (SMIF). The purpose of this paper is to examine the TVA Investment Challenge Program and its implementation at The University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM).

Each university has the freedom to structure the process for students to manage its investment fund as it chooses. This paper provides a description of the overall Investment Challenge Program and the specific Program at UTM.

The Investment Challenge Program is a valuable experiential learning opportunity for finance majors at UTM. Participating students enhance their portfolio management knowledge, their written and oral communication skills, and their employment opportunities.

The paper is limited to TVA Portfolio guidelines and managerial style.

Faculty who supervise similar programs at other universities may be able to replicate some aspects of the program’s design.

The paper describes the TVA Investment Challenge, a unique program of SMIF. TVA provided funds to 25 universities with the stipulation that the student managers adhere to the same guidelines as TVA’s professional money managers. The university is a participant in the Program.

Italian real estate mutual funds have shown enormous growth over the past few years, however, little is known about their performance. The purpose of this paper is to correct this oversight.

The risk‐adjusted performance, as measured by the Sharpe ratio, of 17 Italian real estate funds is valued using a number of fund characteristics and monthly data over the period 2005‐2008. Two models are constructed and ordinary least squares regressions are applied.

Active property management, the level of property‐type diversification and the way the fund is initially setup (either by subscription or by contribution) are found to be significant factors in differentiating the performance between Italian real estate funds.

The relatively short period of time (three years) used in the empirical analysis might represent its major drawback, also considering that data cover only the upward trend of the market cycle: a further research should be addressed when a longer time series is available.

Results are of interest to investors and financial planners alike in revealing which factors should be considered in selecting Italian real estate funds.

The main contribution of the paper is to study those characteristics of Italian real estate funds which have power in explaining their performance. The area of research is well known, the sample is new.