Managing a portfolio with real assets is an exercise that is common enough at universities, but taking the structure of a mutual fund and allowing for the management of assets by real investors recruited from the student population had never been attempted before in Canada. The challenge that the students involved in the HEC's Student Investment Fund had set for themselves was to get the fund to perform at a level matching the investors' expectations, which they pulled off brilliantly. The FPHEC, after setting out to offer its clients a selection of investments with acceptable returns and training on how to manage an investment portfolio also managed to rank among the top ten Canadian equity funds out of 320 in 1998.