CFA Institute Conferences
CFA Institute president and CEO Paul Smith, CFA, stood before a crowd of more than 1600 investment professionals from across the globe at the 70th CFA Institute Annual Conference in Philadelphia, and asked a critical question: “What is finance for?”
“While women’s leadership advancement is no longer impossible,” says Hannah Riley Bowles, “it is awfully tricky.” She urges women to think about career negotiations from a more strategic perspective.
The leading posts to emerge from the European Investment Conference in London include a report on Tim Harford's take on economic forecasting; a Lindsey Matthews, CFA, presentation on the resurgence of middle-office positions; and a dire warning from Michala Marcussen, CFA, on the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.
There is still time for the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in 2015, but at last month's CFA Institute Fixed-Income Management Conference in Boston, several speakers noted that "boosting rates for the first time in nearly a decade is hard — and getting harder with each passing month."
What sort of current values are available to credit investors? Carl L. Eichstaedt III, CFA, a portfolio manager at Western Asset Management Company, identified four segments of opportunity.
The pioneering businesswoman Barbara Roberts examined how far women in finance have come in the last 50 years and presented some surprising research about where things may be heading today in her presentation at the recent Women in Investment Management Conference. In particular, she focused on demographic changes, the ongoing pay gap, and the blossoming influence of millennials.
Truly diverse teams bring to bear broader networks of resources, power, and talent and when led by a culturally fluent leader can significantly outperform less diverse teams. Abandoning exclusionary habits and building a consistently inclusive firm culture is not a simple endeavor. Still, as leaders you can employ strategies to move the firm in this direction.
If you work in the mutual fund industry, take a look around. How many women do you see? My guess: Not too many.
Diligence and hard work, keeping your nose to the grindstone, will always pay off when seeking to land your next promotion or job opportunity, right? Actually, no.
Have you ever wondered why women and men make different investment decisions and what effect, if any, this has on alpha?