This week brings the launch of Columbia's first official investment fund managed by a group of undergrads. It's called "The Lion Fund", and it officially starts trading today, May 1st.  

Xander Ciucci, SEAS 2012, is an executive board member of the new fund describes the new venture: "The Lion Fund is a small investment fund that a group of students has started at Columbia with the goal of eventually integrating it with Columbia administration and making a legacy at Columbia, where students can come and get financial experience and actually be trading real money."

An independent entity, The Lion Fund was registered by the student group in Virginia as a Limited Liability Company. At the moment, it is a very small fund - at least, by industry standards.

Ciucci says, "Right now we have about $50,000 of capital. Our plan is by 2012, we'll have about $250,000 dollars of Assets Under Management." How do they plan to do this? Ciucci defines the Lion Fund strategy as "Event Driven" - which is industry jargon for placing bets around market-moving events.

Here he describes the process: "We'll be meeting every two weeks, and the beginning of the meeting is going over major news events. So all the member are required to keep up with what's going on." Ciucci continues, "If we hear anything that is going on in the market that we think is going to cause certain shifts - we'll place our bets and see how that moves in the market. It doesn't matter where the event is, as long as we can make a trade on it with stock or an ETF with some options." This strategy is heavily dependent on news events. What is it they listen for? 

"Current market movements - certainly companies when they release their earnings, if you can notice a trend in that - semiconductor companies have been having a strong quarter or financial companies have been hurting on weak trading volume. Noticing trends is very valuable," he says.  

Ok, Lion Fund Managers, listen up, as CTV brings you the latest tradable market update on The Parker Report from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange...

Despite the hype this week, the debut federal reserve press conference turned out to be a non-event, with investors focusing instead on the continued strength of Q1 earnings, with the S & P500 ended the week up 2% and the Dow up 2.4%.  

The big surprise came from Caterpillar, the world's largest maker of construction machinery. CAT earned $1.84 a share in Q1 versus only 36 cents a share last year in Q1, and have increased their full year earnings estimates. Given CAT's strong market share in key global economies like China, this signals a bullish trend.

In commodities, Gold hit a nominal record high of $1,569 per Ounce this week. No doubt, the Lion Fund is keeping a close eye on the Spider Gold Trust. Its the ETF that tracks the price of Gold, which was up 4.1% this week.

And event driven investors took note of Exelon Corp's offer to buy Constellation Energy in a deal worth about $7.9 billion - representing the largest recent consolidation in the US nuclear power industry. Exelon's share price jumped over 2% this week.

And that's a wrap for the Parker Report. Good luck to Lion Fund Investors!