This article published by the European Corporate Governance and written by Tilburg University academics examines the post-financial crisis trends in the private equity industry, showing investors are demanding the inclusion of more investor-favorable compensation terms in limited partnership agreements.

The findings suggest these new terms not only provide the investors with more favorable management fee and profit distribution arrangements, but also give them more control over the fund’s investment decisions.

Importantly, the new pattern also reveals the inclusion of more straightforward co-investment rights.

Besides the contractual ‘improvements’, we observe that investors want to see more skin in the game from the managers/general partners.

To access the paper click below

Recasting private equity funds after the fiancial crisis

Chief investment officer of the $60 billion Mass PRIM, Michael Trotsky, believes the CFA Code of Conduct helps institutional investors assess managers and is an important step in restoring trust in financial services. Integrity will form part of the due diligence process as the fund looks for private equity co-investment partners for the first time.

The $60 billion Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board has nearly 300 investment manager relationships, and chief investment officer, Michael Trotsky, holds those managers to account, quizzing them on values and ethics as part of the due diligence process.

He is the chair of the CFA Institute asset manager code advisory committee, and takes his role in progressing integrity in the industry seriously.

“There is a crisis of confidence in money management and banking,” he says. “Trust is an acute problem in the industry. This code is an attempt to address it in some sense.”

Mass PRIM includes a question in its RFPs asking manager whether they adhere to the code, and if not why not.

“There are about 1000 firms globally which claim compliance, so we can’t use it as an absolute litmus test yet. But the dialogue of why not is interesting and in all cases if they are not already compliant then they do.”

Trotsky says the code of conduct sits alongside the more quantitative GIPS reporting standards that are used almost universally now by managers.

“The GIPS standards make sure managers are accurate and transparent about reporting performance which helps in due diligence of managers on the quant side,” he says. “Every due diligence process includes qualitative and quantitative qualities, looking at behaviours, processes and values. Values are an important part of manager evaluation. The way I view the code of conduct is it helps institutions evaluate the qualitative side of a manager’s firm, it fits hand in glove with quantitative factors.”

The code is also an indication that the upper management, where the values come from, are putting an emphasis on values ethical behaviour, and while it is not a guarantee of ethical behaviour, Trotsky believes it is a starting point.

“The principles are so basic that anyone who has a problem or objection is a serious red flag,” he says. “In practice, the reason for not complying is they either don’t know about it but when they read it are happy to sign on, or they know about it but they have their own code of conduct which his usually more detailed.” This is true particularly of the larger managers.

It is not just at the RFP point of contact that the fund quizzes a manager’s integrity. Mass PRIM makes multiple visits a year to its managers and asks if any employees have violated the CFA code, their own code, or the law.

“It ensures upper level management are engaged.”

The investments of Mass PRIM are 100 per cent outsourced to external managers, and consistent with its integrity focus, transparency plays a key role.

On the public market side it has complete transparency through its custodian, BNY Mellon.

And in the asset classes that are not as transparent, such as transparent, it is pushing for more, such as hedge funds.

An example of this is an RFP it just issued for managed accounts in hedge funds, with transparency one of the driving factors of the structure.

“Managed accounts give us more rigorous and frequent transparency. Most funds are willing to give positions but usually on a lag, I understand the reasoning and it is a balancing act,” he says. “In an ideal world there would be full transparency and managers don’t have to worry about giving away their positions. There needs to be trust both ways.”

Over a year ago launched project SAVE – strategic analysis value enhancement – introducing six initiatives to save or add value, worth an estimated savings of $100 million annually.

One of those initiatives was moving from a hedge fund of funds to direct hedge funds, which saved $40 million in fees.

But not only was it a cost saving initiative, it changed the nature of the relationships – reducing the underlying funds from 237 in the fund of funds structure to 22 in direct funds – and thus transparency.

The fund has a successful private equity program, recognised recently by Buyout Magazine and the Private Equity Council as the best in the country, and for the first time in PRIM’s history it was approved this week to do co-investments.

This will also introduce huge fee savings, with every $100 million deployed about $26 million will be saved over the life of the investment.

The private equity allocation is 10 per cent of assets. The co-investment program will look to invest alongside talented GPs in the US and developed markets.

The SAVE project has also seen the implementation of a cash overlay, worth about $25 million a year in added value.

This year Mass PRIM will be analysing whether it is appropriate to engage in some internal investment management.

 

Mass PRIM fund core asset allocation

Global equity                                    43 per cent

Core fixed income                           13 per cent

Value-added fixed income          10 per cent

Private equity                                   10 per cent

Real estate                                          10 per cent

Timber/natural resources            4 per cent

Hedge funds                                       10 per cent

 

 

CFA Asset Manager Code of Conduct:

1. Act in a professional and ethical manner at all times.

2. Act for the benefit of clients.

3. Act with independence and objectivity.

4. Act with skill, competence, and diligence.

5. Communicate with clients in a timely and accurate manner.

6. Uphold the applicable rules governing capital markets.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the enduring areas of asset management academic study, and practitioner query, is whether or not managers have skill. In his work, professor of finance at Stanford, Jonathan Berk, shows the answer doesn’t lie in returns but in manager compensation.

 

Determining whether active skill exists is not the same as looking at whether investors get a net return from managers. It’s a difficult concept for institutional investors to grasp; their focus for so long (rightly) is on how they generate a return for their beneficiaries. But in an academic sense, and ultimately in choosing managers which generate those returns, skill is not found by looking at returns.

The research of professor of finance at Stanford University, Jonathan Berk, shows that return does not measure skill: rather, manager compensation is a better proxy for sorting out the top managers from the mediocre ones.

Berk, who teaches a course in critical analytical thinking in addition to his money management course, argues that net alpha measures the competitiveness of markets and the rationality of investors, giving information about investors but not about managers.

Instead, he argues that compensation is a better proxy for ranking good managers.

“You can look at compensation out of sample. The top decile managers make more money than the lower, the only way variation can arise is through size, which means investors are compensating them. Investors are predicting good managers,” he says, and in this way the current compensation of managers can predict future performance.

“This analysis does a much better job of sorting out the mediocre managers,” he says.

Berk demonstrated this argument to delegates at the conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com investment think tank, made up of chief investment officers of public and corporate funds as well as foundations and endowments, which falls back on one of the foundations of economics: that people with skill are in short supply and earn economic rents.

In the paper co-authored with Jules H. van Binsbergen, Measuring Skill in the Mutual Fund Industry, published in November last year, Berk looks at whether mutual funds earn economic rents without possessing skill. It’s a different look at an old problem.

The paper, which was the basis of Berk’s presentation at the investment think tank, finds that the average mutual fund has added value by extracting about $2 million a year from financial markets. And, the authors say, most importantly the cross-sectional differences in value added are persistent for as long as 10 years.

They conclude that it is hard to reconcile the findings with anything other than the existence of money management skill.

The argument follows that higher skilled managers manage larger funds and reap higher rewards. And that, surprisingly, investors appear to identify talent and compensate it, so current compensation predicts future performance.

“Look at the most successful mutual fund manager of all time, Peter Lynch,” Berk says. “For the first five years he returned 2 per cent gross on $40 million a value added of $1 million per month, in the last five years he returned 20 basis points gross alpha on assets that grew to $10 billion, a value added of $20 million per month,” Berk says. “If you looked at alpha instead of value added, you have concluded that Peter Lynch was lucky.”

Berk argues that net alpha measures the competitiveness of markets and the rationality of investors, but tells you little about managers, or whether they possess skill.

“Net alpha doesn’t tell you about managers, it tells you about investors,” he says. “Using net alpha has led to people concluding that mutual fund managers are unskilled when in fact they are actually highly skilled.”

Berk uses a basketball analogy to demonstrate why net alpha, or the return to the investor, is not useful in measuring skill.

“Is field goal percentage a good measure of a basketballer’s performance? No, because the defence adjusts. For example Michael Jordon was double teamed, and this affected not only Michael Jordan’s field goal percentage but also Scott Pippen’s,” he says.

“If you were a coach (without integer constraints) and were optimising, then the field goal percentage of each player would be the same. Similarly investors all want to invest with managers that can deliver positive alpha. In equilibrium this inflow of capital drives alphas down to zero. Like basketball players, all managers make the same alpha and so alpha tells you nothing about managerial quality.”

Similarly gross alpha, which is just net alpha plus the fee, is also not useful to measure skill.

“The manager picks his fee so how can that be used to measure his skill?”

Berk presented his paper which was followed by a roundtable discussion with the investors and sponsors (see full delegate list here).

 

The presentation incited many questions and discussion points from the investors around the table, including:

Are benchmarks properly diversified?

-David Cooper, chief investment officer, Indiana Retirement System

Will skill get competed away?

-Farouki Majeed, chief investment officer, Ohio Public Schools Retirement System

Do inflows cost performance or the other way?

-David Long, co-chief investment officer, HOOPP

Are there liquidity and capacity constraints?

-Eric Baggessen, senior investment officer, head of asset allocation, CalPERS

As assets grow do managers need to change their strategy because the AUM is restrictive?

-Hershel Harper, chief investment officer, South Carolina Retirement System

 

As a result of the discussion, investors want to see further academic study answering the questions:

Is skill with the individual or the firm?

Do investors need skill to pick managers?

 

 

 

Three finance professors from Stanford University presented their latest papers on active management, private equity and financial regulation, which were debated and work-shopped by US institutional investors in a one-day investment think tank.

Chief investment officers from US public and corporate pension funds, endowments and foundations convened at Menlo Park, the home of Stanford University, for a one-day investment think-tank.

The roundtable sought to fuse the latest academic thinking with investment best practice to give investors an edge in decision making.

This highly interactive discussion was jointly facilitated by conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com and Professor Stephen Kotkin from Princeton University, and supported by BNY Mellon and Lexington Partners.

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DELEGATES
Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford University
Eric Baggesen, senior investment officer for asset allocation and risk management, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS)
Jonathan Berk, Professor of Finance, Stanford University
Mary Cahill, chief investment officer, Emory University
David Cooper, Chief investment officer, Indiana Public Retirement System (PERF)
John Donaghey, head of North American institutional distribution, BNY Mellon Investment Management
Hershel Harper, chief investment officer, South Carolina Retirement Systems
MaDoe Htun, chief investment officer, William Penn Foundation
Jennifer W. Kheng, principal, Lexington Partners
Stephen Kotkin, professor, Princeton University
William Lee, VP, pension & foundation investments, chief investment officer, Kaiser Permanente
Jamie Lewin, head of manager research and performance analytics; chief investment officer, BNY Mellon Investment Management; Lockwood Advisors, a BNY Mellon co.
David Long, Senior vice president and chief investment officer, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan
Farouki Majeed, Chief investment officer, Ohio School Employees Retirement Systems (OHSERS)
Tom Newby, partner Lexington Partners
Joshua Rauh, professor, Stanford University
Stan Rupnik, Chief investment officer & interim executive director, Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System
John Skjervem, Chief investment officer, Oregon State Treasury
Colin Tate, chief executive, Conexus Financial
Amanda White, Editor of conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, Conexus Financial

 

Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford University

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, trading mechanisms, financial contracting, corporate governance and banking. Her book with Martin Hellwig, The Bankers’ New Clothes, was hailed as “the most important to emerge from the financial crisis” by Martin Wolf.

Admati holds a BS from Hebrew University, Jerusalem and a PhD from Yale. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, has served on editorial boards and on the American Finance Association board, and currently serves on the FDIC Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. Back to top

Eric Baggesen, senior investment officer for asset allocation and risk management, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS)

Eric Baggesen is the senior investment officer of asset allocation and risk management for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). He is responsible for asset allocation implementation, and the monitoring and managing of CalPERS total investment portfolio.

He joined CalPERS in November 2004 and served as the fund’s senior portfolio manager and senior investment officer for global equity.

Baggesen holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Rhode Island and is a Chartered Financial Analyst and holds a Charter in Alternative Investments.

CalPERS is the largest public pension fund in the US with approximately $260 billion in market assets. It provides retirement benefits to more than 1.6 million Californians. Back to top


Jonathan Berk, Professor of Finance, Stanford University

Professor Berk, A.P. Giannini Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has co-authored two finance textbooks: Fundamentals in Finance as well as Corporate Finance, which remains the most successful first edition textbook ever published in financial economics.

His research has won numerous awards, including the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award, the Smith Breeden Prize, Best Paper of the Year in the Review of Financial Studies, and the FAME Research Prize. His article, “A Critique of Size-Related Anomalies,” was selected as one of the two best papers ever published in the Review of Financial Studies, and was also honored as one of the 100 seminal papers published by Oxford University Press. Also, he has received the Graham and Dodd Award of Excellence, the Roger F. Murray Prize, and the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award, in recognition of his influence on the practice of finance.

Professor Berk was born and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, and received his PhD in finance from Yale University. Back to top

Mary Cahill, chief investment officer, Emory University

Mary L. Cahill is vice president of investments and chief investment officer of Emory University overseeing investments of all endowment, trust, operating, and employee benefit funds of the University and related medical facilities. Prior to joining Emory, Mary was deputy chief investment officer of Xerox Corporation.

Cahill has 30 years of investment experience with prior positions including deputy director of the Virginia Retirement System, director of the SmithKline pension fund and pension management positions with BellSouth and Merck.

She is a member of the NYSE Pension Managers Advisory Committee, a board member of the Emory Center for Alternative Investments, a board member of The Institute For Quantitative Research in Finance, a trustee of The Woodruff Arts Center, and a director of the Robert Toigo Foundation. She has an MBA specializing in finance from St. John’s University and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. Back to top

David Cooper, chief investment officer, Indiana Public Retirement System (PERF)

David Cooper is the chief investment officer and is responsible for overseeing investment assets totaling approximately $25 billion for Indiana Public Retirement System, formerly Indiana Public Employees Retirement Fund (PERF) and Indiana State Teachers Retirement Fund (TRF). INPRS serves the needs of more than 233,000 active members and 122,000 benefit recipients. INPRS also represents more than 1,400 employers including public universities, school corporations, municipalities and state agencies.

Cooper holds an undergraduate degree from Purdue University and a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Butler University. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designee. Back to top

John Donaghey, head of North American institutional distribution, BNY Mellon Investment Management

John Donaghey leads North American institutional distribution for investment management at BNY Mellon Investment Management.

Donaghey is an executive vice president and board member of the MBSC Securities Corporation, BNY Mellon’s registered broker dealer, supervising all FINRA representatives in the Mellon Funds Division of MBSC. He is also a member of BNY Mellon’s Revenue Growth Board.

Prior to joining BNY Mellon in 2006, he worked on new business development and client service for Goldman Sachs Asset Management in San Francisco. He was also a senior vice president with Putnam Investments, responsible for Taft-Hartley defined benefit and defined contribution business in San Francisco and Boston, having been recruited from Putnam’s 1992 MBA internship program.

He holds an M.B.A. from Boston College and FINRA Series 7, 63 and 24 licenses. He is also both a Chartered Financial Analyst and a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst. Back to top

Hershel Harper, chief investment officer, South Carolina Retirement Systems

Hershel Harper is the chief investment officer of the South Carolina Retirement System Investment Commission (RSIC). The RSIC is a $27 billion defined benefit pension plan serving more than 530,000 participants and retirees. Harper and his team analyze the liabilities of the pension obligation, determine the optimal asset allocation necessary to meet that obligation, and deploy those assets accordingly.

Prior to joining the RSIC, Harper gained valuable market experience conducting investment and industry research, focusing on asset allocation and global equity markets, at SSgA, Columbia Management, and Evergreen Investments.

Harper earned his Masters in Finance from Louisiana State University and his Bachelor in Finance from Louisiana Tech University. He earned his Chartered Financial Analyst designation and remains active in the CFA Society of South Carolina. Back to top

MaDoe Htun, chief investment officer, William Penn Foundation

MaDoe Htun is chief investment officer of the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia where she is responsible for managing the foundation’s assets.

Prior to joining the William Penn Foundation, Htun served as the chief investment officer of the Xerox Worldwide Pension and Savings Plan assets. She began her career at Xerox where she held various finance positions before joining the Xerox Trust Investment Group in 1996, though she also served as director of Equity Strategies for General Motors Asset Management (GMAM) for a time before returning to Xerox.

Htun received a B.A. with honors from Smith College and went on to receive her Masters of Business Administration from the University of Chicago. She also holds a Juris Doctorate Degree from George Washington University. Htun is a Chartered Financial Analyst, a member of the bar in Illinois and Washington, D.C. and is a registered patent attorney. Back to top

Jennifer W. Kheng, principal, Lexington Partners

Jennifer Kheng is a principal of Lexington primarily engaged in the evaluation of secondary purchases of buyout, mezzanine and venture capital interests. Prior to joining Lexington in 2003, Kheng was an analyst in investment banking at Morgan Stanley.

Kheng graduated from Stanford University with a BS in biological sciences and an MS in management science and engineering. Back to top

Stephen Kotkin, professor, Princeton University

Professor Kotkin holds a joint appointment in the history department and the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton, where he has been teaching since 1989. He has served as vice dean and is currently acting director of international programs.

Professor Kotkin established the university’s global history workshop. He serves on the core editorial committee of the flagship journal, World Politics. He founded and edits a book series on Northeast Asia. From 1996 until 2009 he directed Princeton’s Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. From 2003 until 2007, he was a member and then chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press.

Outside Princeton, he has served as a consultant, investigator, and strategist for the Open Society Foundations (Soros) and other agencies in post-Communist higher education. From 2006 (until February 2009) he was the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section. Back to top

William Lee, VP, pension & foundation investments, chief investment officer, Kaiser Permanente

William Lee is chief investment officer and vice president of pensions and foundation investments at Kaiser Permanente. He has served as chair of Kaiser Permanente’s investment committee since 2005. Lee oversees approximately $34 billion in defined contribution, pension and foundation assets.

He managed interest rate and foreign exchange risk for Bank of America’s global proprietary desks in the 1980’s, then left for nine years to work as a police detective. In 1994 he returned to Bank of America, where he helped develop equity risk models before becoming senior vice president and chief investment officer for Bank of America’s retirement plans.

Lee managed the Levi Strauss Foundation and Red Tab Foundation assets as well as the Levi Strauss domestic and international retirement plans. He is a chartered financial analyst (CFA). Back to top

Jamie Lewin, head of manager research and performance analytics; chief investment officer, BNY Mellon Investment Management; Lockwood Advisors, a BNY Mellon co.

Jamie Lewin is head of manager research and performance analytics for BNY Mellon Investment Management and is chief investment officer for Lockwood Advisors, a BNY Mellon company.

He was formerly director of asset allocation strategies as a member of the investment strategy and solutions group of BNY Mellon and was responsible for overseeing the development and management of integrated multi-asset investment solutions that leverage the full complement of BNY Mellon specialist investment management capabilities.

He is a director of BNY Mellon Asset Management International Ltd and is a member of the BNY Mellon Asset Management International Executive Committee.

Lewin joined BNY Mellon from UBS Global Asset Management where he was senior asset allocation strategist for the global investment solutions group. Back to top

David Long, senior vice president and chief investment officer, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan

Long is responsible for asset/liability modelling and portfolio construction, derivatives and fixed income, and short term and foreign exchange.

He holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Waterloo and is a CFA charter holder. Back to top



Farouki Majeed, chief investment officer, Ohio School Employees Retirement Systems (OHSERS)

Farouki Majeed joined School Employees Retirement System of Ohio as director of investments in July, 2012.

Majeed comes to SERS of Ohio from CalPERS, where he served as senior investment officer asset allocation and risk management from 2007 to 2012. Previouslyhe was the inaugural CIO of the Abu Dhabi retirement Pensions and Benefits Fund of the United Arab Emirates. He was deputy director, investments, for the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System from 2002 to 2004. Majeed was chief investment officer for the Orange County Employees Retirement System from 1997 to 2002 and investment officer of the Minneapolis employees retirement Fund from 1991 to 1997.

Mr. Majeed began his finance career in 1980 with the National Development Bank of Sri Lanka, his homeland, and worked in the Asia Division of Bank of America prior to arriving in the US in 1987 to pursue graduate studies.

Majeed holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration/Finance from Rutgers University, and a Bachelor Degree in Engineering from the University of Sri Lanka. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst. Mr. Majeed also serves on a voluntary basis as a member of the Investment Advisory Committee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Provident fund based in Amman, Jordan. Back to top

Tom Newby, partner Lexington Partners

Tom Newby is a partner of Lexington primarily engaged in the origination and evaluation of secondary purchases of buyout, mezzanine and venture capital interests. Prior to joining Lexington in 2007, he was a managing director and the head of principal investing at Montgomery & Co., an investment bank.

Prior to that, he was a general partner of Technology Crossover Ventures and an associate in investment banking at Montgomery Securities. Newby graduated from University of North Carolina with a BS in business administration and from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA. Back to top

Joshua Rauh, professor, Stanford University

Professor Rauh, Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, has attracted national media coverage for his studies of state and local pension systems in the United States.

He has won numerous awards for his research papers. “Investment and Financing Constraints: Evidence from the Funding of Corporate Pension Plans” was awarded the 2006 Brattle Prize for the outstanding research paper on corporate finance published in the Journal of Finance. “Public Pension Promises: How Big Are They and What Are they Worth?” coauthored with Robert Novy-Marx, won the Smith Breeden Prize for the outstanding research paper on capital markets published in the Journal of Finance. “Earnings Manipulation, Pension Assumptions and Managerial Investment Decisions,”coauthored with Daniel Bergstresser and Mihir Desai, won the Barclays Global Investor Best Symposium Paper from the European Finance Association and appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Professor Rauh received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Back to top

Stan Rupnik, chief investment officer, Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System

Stan Rupnik is the chief investment officer for the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois (TRS).  TRS is the largest public plan in the state of Illinois, with an investment portfolio of $40.8 billion.  As CIO, Rupnik has direct oversight of all asset classes and manages an internal staff as well as the full roster of external investment managers.

Rupnik joined TRS in April 2003. He has held various investment-related roles including portfolio management, equity research, and credit analysis. Prior to TRS, he was associated with GE Asset Management in Stamford, Connecticut.

Rupnik is an alumnus of the University of Illinois, receiving both an undergraduate degree in Economics and a Master of Business Administration from the Urbana-Champaign campus. He is also a CFA Charterholder.

TRS is the retirement system for public school teachers and administrators employed in all Illinois public schools except the city of Chicago.  It serves 389,900 members.

. Back to top

John Skjervem, chief investment officer, Oregon State Treasury

As chief investment officer for the Oregon State Treasury (OST), Skjervem oversees an investment team that manages a financial and real asset portfolio valued at over $80 billion as of June 30, 2013 and includes the state’s $63 billion Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund.

Prior to his appointment at OST, he held a variety of portfolio management and leadership positions at Northern Trust including chief investment officer for the firm’s $170 billion (AUM) personal financial services division. He started his career as an associate economist for consultants Natelson Levander Whitney, and also worked as a public finance specialist for investment bankers Ehrlich Bober & Co.

Skjervem earned an M.B.A. with concentrations in finance and statistics from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst, former director of the CFA Society of Chicago and serves as an honorary board member for the St. Francis Foundation in Santa Barbara, CA. Back to top

Colin Tate, chief executive, Conexus Financial

Tate has nearly 20 years’ experience in media, both as a publisher and marketing executive at Trade News, Reed Business Publishing and InvestorInfo. Before Conexus Financial, he headed his own design and advertising agency. He has been a commentator on and proponent of industry reform, and the need for creating trust between superannuation members and the financial advice industry. Back to top

Amanda White, editor of conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, Conexus Financial

White is responsible for the content across all Conexus Financial’s institutional media and events. She is the editor of conexust1f.flywheelstaging.com, the online news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. White has been an investment journalist for more than 18 years and has edited industry journals including Investment & Technology, Investor Weekly and MasterFunds Quarterly.

She waspreviously editorial director of InvestorInfo and has worked as a freelance journalist for the Australian Financial Review, CFO, Asset and Asia Asset Management.

She has a Bachelor of Economics and a Master of Arts in Journalism and is a columnist for the Canadian publication, Corporate Knights, which is distributed by the Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. Back to top

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A research paper by executives at the Dutch Central Bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, examines tail risk, and shows that historical tail betas are able to capture the sensitivity to future systematic tail risk.

 

The paper can be downloaded here 

Systemic tail risk