IMCA Annual Conference

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University. His interests span a wide range of behaviors, and his sometimes unusual experiments are consistently interesting, amusing, and informative, demonstrating profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom. In addition to appointments at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Department of Economics, and the School of Medicine at Duke University, he is also a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and the author of New York Times bestsellers Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. His latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, takes a thought-provoking look at our preconceptions about dishonesty and urges us to take an honest look at ourselves. He earned a PhD in business administration from Duke University, PhD and MA degrees in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in psychology from Tel Aviv University.

Keith Black is associate director of curriculum for the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) Association, where he writes curriculum and exams covering topics in alternative investments. Previously he worked at Ennis Knupp + Associates advising foundations, endowments, and pension funds on asset allocation and manager selection strategies in hedge funds, commodities, and managed futures. Before that, he worked in commodities derivatives trading, stock options trading on the CBOE floor, and building quantitative stock selection models. He also has been an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School, where he taught courses in traditional and alternative investments. He is author of Managing a Hedge Fund and he contributes regularly to CFA Digest and other journals. Institutional Investor listed him among its 2010 Rising Stars of Hedge Funds. He earned a BA from Whittier College, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Paul Bouchey is the managing director of research at Parametric, where he leads the research team and is responsible for new product development. His research interests include taxable portfolio management and volatility harvesting strategies. Previously he worked as a quantitative analyst with Russell Investment Group. He earned a BA degree in mathematics and physics from Whitman College and a certificate in computational finance from the University of Washington.

Glenn Caldicott is a senior portfolio manager in the personal investment advisory program as well as a senior vice president at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America. He is the owner, creator, and manager of the investment strategies known as The Insider Portfolio®. He began his career at Providence Capitol where he helped manage a bond portfolio. He then moved into the retail brokerage with Moseley, Hallgarten, Estabrook and Weeden and later worked at L. F. Rothschild and later Advest, where he founded the money management group Caldicott Associates. Merrill Lynch acquired Advest in December of 2005. He earned a BS in finance and investments from Babson College.

Christine Courtnage is a wealth strategist for U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management in Chicago, where she consults with clients to develop and coordinate financial planning solutions, particularly in tax and estate matters. She is a frequent speaker on financial planning topics and has authored articles for a variety of professional and client publications. Previously she worked as a CPA/financial planner and was practice leader of Price Waterhouse’s Personal Financial Services group in Houston. She earned a BS in journalism and marketing research from Southern Illinois University and an MS in accounting from the University of Houston.

Brian Drainville is an institutional portfolio manager for Fidelity Management & Research Company, the investment advisor for Fidelity’s mutual funds, where he is responsible for aligning investment objectives and asset management opportunities with investment solutions provided by the firm’s international equity and high income division. Previously he served as a director and senior vice president for Columbia Management Group. He earned a BA degree in economics, magna cum laude, from the College of the Holy Cross. He is a member of the Association for Investment Management & Research and the Boston Security Analysts Society.

Sean Gabrio is a partner with The Pacific Wealth Group of Morgan Stanley, where he focuses on asset allocation, portfolio management, and business succession planning. He earned a BS degree from the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.

Anil K. Gupta is the Michael Dingman Chair in Global Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business, The University of Maryland at College Park. Widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and globalization, he is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of more than 70 papers and four books: Getting China and India Right, The Quest for Global Dominance, Smart Globalization, and Global Strategy and Organization. Dr. Gupta serves as a regular columnist on “Getting China and India Right” for Bloomberg Businessweek. The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching, he has been recognized by Businessweek as an Outstanding Faculty in its Guide to the Best B-Schools, inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame, and ranked by Management International Review as one of the “Top 20 North American Superstars” for research in strategy and organization. He earned a PhD from Harvard Business School, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. He also serves as chief advisor to The China India Institute, a Washington DC-based research and consulting organization.

Mr. Kao is a senior vice president and stable value account manager in the Newport Beach office. Prior to joining PIMCO in 2010, he was a product engineer for stable value and corporate cash management at State Street Global Advisors. Mr. Kao was previously an executive director and head of stable value and relative value trading at UBS. He has 25 years of investment and financial services experience and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in applied economics from Cornell University.

James LaFleur is a senior associate with Mercer Investments, where he is the lead for a number of 401(k), pension, endowment/foundation, and wealth management clients, and manages the Boston office analyst team. Previously he worked as a finance/capital analyst for Intel Corp., where he was responsible for his division’s capital spending and assisting with infrastructure projects. He earned a BS in finance, magna cum laude, from Bentley College and an MBA in finance, with high honors, from Boston University.

Bio coming soon.

Bob is the Alternative Investment Editor for Bloomberg TV, and appears daily on “MoneyMoves with Deirdre Bolton.”  He is the Founder and Managing Partner of merchant bank Tangent Capital, and serves on boards of EULAV Asset Management and of Gust, a leading platform for startups and seed investors.  He is also the author of the HarperCollins book, The Alternative Answer, the first book to explain the new world of alternative investing strategies, showing how to use these new products for inflation-protected income, risk-adjusted growth, and long-term wealth transfer.

 Bob has been involved in Alternatives world for 30 years. After starting his career at the U.S. Justice Department, he worked on the early generations of swaps and derivatives as a Partner at premiere Wall Street’s law firm Milbank, Tweed.  He then entered the venture capital and private equity world via Wexford Capital, where he launched a 3D technology startup that later became the publicly traded Viewpoint, of which he served as CEO.  In 2004, he founded Tangent, whose principals have raised and invested billions of dollars for and in alternative funds and transactions.

 Bob appears regularly on FOX News, Sirius XM and has appeared on CNBC, CBS, and the BBC.  

K. Geert Rouwenhorst is professor of corporate finance and the deputy director of the International Center for Finance at Yale. Dr. Rouwenhorst also has held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the International Monetary Fund. He specializes in international finance and asset pricing, including the empirical trade-off between risk and return in developed and emerging stock markets, and portfolio choice. His recent work examines hedge fund strategies, mutual fund settlement, commodity investments, and the history of financial innovation. Dr. Rouwenhorst has published articles in academic and practitioner-oriented journals, and his work has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times. He co-edited The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets. Dr. Rouwenhorst earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from Erasmus University and a PhD in business administration from the University of Rochester.

Trent Sanden has been First Vice President of Investments and Senior Institutional Consultant with UBS Institutional Consulting Group since 2001. He is a member of the Western Pension and Benefits Conference.  He received his BA from Northwestern University and is currently a guest faculty speaker with the Association of Small Foundations.

William Shipman is chairman of CarriageOaks Partners LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in retirement finance. An advocate of Social Security reform, he is co-author of Promises to Keep: Saving Social Security’s Dream; he has testified before Congress on this topic. He is co-chairman of the Cato Project on Social Security Choice and was on the advisory board of Americans Discuss Social Security, a non-profit organization funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to generate informed debate on the issue. His research has been published in academic journals and by the National Center for Policy Analysis, The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute. Before establishing CarriageOaks, he spent more than 30 years in institutional financial research, consulting, and investment management. He was a principal of State Street Global Advisors, a trustee of the SSgA Funds, a founding partner of H. C. Wainwright Co. Economics, and a general partner of H. C. Wainwright & Co. 

Meir Statman, PhD, MBA is the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University and a visiting professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His research in behavioral finance targets how investors and managers make financial decisions and how these decisions are reflected in financial markets. He is author of the book What Investors Really Want, as well as research papers published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Journal of Investment Consulting, and many other scholarly publications. The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute, and Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA). He is a member of the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal; the advisory boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Journal of Wealth Management, and the Journal of Investment Consulting; an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Research, the Journal of Behavioral Finance, and the Journal of Investment Management; and a recipient of a Batterymarch Fellowship, a William F. Sharpe Best Paper Award, a Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Outstanding Article Award, an IMCA Davis Ethics Award, a Moskowitz Prize for best paper on socially responsible investing, two IMCA Baker Journal Awards, and three Graham and Dodd Awards. He earned a PhD from Columbia University and BA and MBA degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan. A former derivatives trader, he is known for a multidisciplinary approach to the role of the high-impact rare event–across economics, philosophy, political science, finance, engineering, and history.

His current focus is on the fragility of systems and designing protocols to live in a world we don't understand.

His books have been published in 32 languages.

Margaret Towle is a partner and managing director with HighTower Advisors, where she works with endowments and wealthy families and serves on the group investment services steering committee. Previously she was a managing director with Greycourt & Co., where she oversaw research and development across traditional and alternative asset classes. Before that she was executive vice president and chief investment officer for Northern Trust Global Advisors. She was a Kauffman Foundation fellow and she received IMCA’s 2006 Stephen L. Kessler Writing Award. She is a member of the Greenwich Roundtable, a founding board member of the Center for Women and Democracy at the University of Washington, and an angel investor in 100 Women in Hedge Funds. She serves on IMCA’s board of directors and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Investment Consulting; she is former chair of IMCA’s advisory council and the Investments & Wealth Monitor editorial advisory board. She earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Washington-Seattle.

Meredith Whitney is chief executive officer of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, LLC, a macro and strategy-driven investment research firm. A Wall Street veteran of more than 15 years, her career has been defined by bold predictions that have garnered global attention. Hailed “The Oracle of Wall Street” by Bloomberg, Ms. Whitney has been ahead of the curve during America’s largest credit crisis since the Great Depression. Her rise to international prominence was triggered in October 2007, when she made one of the most controversial and highly publicized calls in Wall Street history. Named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009 by TIME Magazine, Ms. Whitney is widely recognized as “one of the most respected voices on Wall Street.” Also one of Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, she is a renowned expert in the finance industry and is frequently quoted in Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times.

Previously, she was a managing director and senior financial institutions analyst for Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., where was most noted for her research on the ultimate decline in home prices, the future of the U.S. mortgage industry, and the consumer lending market.