Join us for cocktails, dinner and the forecast for stocks and bonds.
Abhijit Chakrabortti
Chief Investment Strategist, Morgan Stanley
Abhijit Chakrabortti came to Morgan Stanley in November 2007 as Chief Investment Strategist. Prior to this role, Abhijit spent 7 years at JP Morgan Chase as the head of US and Global Equity Strategy for U.S and Global Equities. Abhijit worked in many major financial ports, such as Hong Kong and London, while representing leading competitive firms including Lehman Brothers and HSBC. For several consecutive years, he was named one of the top ranked global strategists by Institutional Investor Magazine. Abhijit studied economics and accounting at Calcutta University and City Guildhall University in London.
He is also a qualified accountant having trained with Ernst & Young in London.
Steven Romick, CFA
Partner, First Pacific Advisors, LLC
Steven is a contrarian value investor with comprehensive expertise in long and short positions across a company’s capital structure. He began his investment career in 1985 with Kaplan, Nathan & Co as an analyst. He started his own firm, Crescent Management, in 1990 in order to focus on finding out-of-favor, low risk/high return investments in various parts of the capital markets. Within the Contrarian Value Strategy, Steven started the Crescent Fund (now the FPA Crescent Fund) in 1993. Today the Crescent Fund is over $1.1 billion and is ranked by Lipper as the #2 Balanced Fund for the ten years ended September 30, 2008 (out of 269 funds in that category). The Crescent Fund currently has a 5-star Morningstar rating. FPA manages equity, fixed, and alternative strategies and had $8.7 Billion under management as of October 31.
Steven earned a BS in Education from Northwestern University and is a CFA Charterholder.
Francois Trahan
Senior Managing Director and Chief Investment Strategist, ISI Group
Francois Trahan is a Senior Managing Director and ISI's Chief Investment Strategist. Francois heads ISI's Investment Policy Committee and serves on ISI's Management Committee. His areas of expertise include portfolio strategy, sector selection, asset allocation, and quantitative analysis. He has been an Institutional Investor's ranked portfolio strategist since 2004. Moreover, ISI's portfolio strategy team, headed by Francois Trahan, was ranked #1 in 2008. Prior to joining ISI, Franccois was Chief Investment Strategist of Bear Stearns for four years and had earlier worked for Ned Davis Research and the Bank Credit Analyst Research Group. He holds a Bachelor of Science in economics and a Master of Science in economics and international finance from the University of Montreal.