The Lally School of Management & Technology

Lally School Innovation Event Series 2009-2010

The recent global financial crisis and the accompanying deep recession have cast doubt on advances in the practice of finance that only a few years ago were celebrated as major contributors to economic growth. Have the 'efficient markets hypothesis' and the so-called 'quant school of finance' recently experienced a perverse form of blind ambition?  Has value investing as articulated by Benjamin Graham and his most successful student, Warren Buffet, resumed its position as the new standard? And, what are the roles of sound judgment and simple common sense in financial decision-making as we emerge from our financial crisis?

Morris Sachs, one of Wall Street's leading credit traders, and RPI's own Ezra Zask will join Professor John Teall for a discussion on the future of finance and financial innovation.  Among other issues, the forum will frame a discussion of recent and current events, comparing and contrasting fundamentals versus quantitative modeling.  What information is most relevant and how can it be combined and supplemented when making different types of key financial decisions?  What are the roles of accounting information?  Market-based statistical information?  Quantitative modeling?  Plain common sense? How have we used and misused these types information in the recent past?  Why do we miss key details?  How can we avoid falling into the same traps in the future?  How can we improve innovation, education and training with respect to these important financial tools as well as other methods of financial analysis?  How do Lally's own International Center for Financial Research and new Financial Engineering and Risk Analytics programs support financial innovation?

Panel

Organized as part of the Lally Innovation Series, the forum is chaired by John Teall, the Jackson Tai ‘72 Clinical Professor of Finance. 

• Morris Sachs     Co-founder of and Chief Risk Officer for 5:15 Capital Management, has over 25 years of market experience. He joined Greenwich Capital Markets in 1992, and from 1995 until his departure in 2008, ran the Proprietary Trading Group, which produced revenues of over $1 Billion. Following Greenwich Capital, Mr. Sachs was Co-CEO of Brevan Howard U.S. Asset Management. From 1988 to 1992 Mr. Sachs was head of proprietary trading at Deutsche Bank Government Securities in New York. Prior to DeutscheBank, he traded Treasury securities for Louis Dreyfus Corporation, Aubrey G. Lanston & Co. and Continental Illinois National Bank in Chicago. He received his B.S in Accountancy from the University of Illinois in 1982, and his Master of Accounting Science from the same institution in 1983.

• Ezra Zask       President of EZA LLC, has been worked in the hedge fund industry for over two decades. He has founded a currency and interest rate arbitrage focused hedge fund, taught finance at RPI, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton and Yale Universities, conducted hedge fund manager searches, advised and raised assets for hedge funds and fund of funds, and managed large scale trading operations and strategic positions for money center banks. Ezra Zask has also worked as a litigation support expert in a number of cases for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Government of Canada, the NASD and major law firms. Ezra Zask currently works as President of Lakeville Capital management which provides hedge fund advisory services to high net worth individuals and funds of hedge funds.

• John Teall      Jackson Tai '72 Clinical Professor of Finance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has previously served on the faculties of New York University, Pace University, Fordham University, Dublin Business School as well as other institutions in the United States, Europe and Australia. Dr. Teall teaches courses in corporate finance, investments, international finance, microeconomics and financial institutions. His primary areas of research and publication have been related to corporate finance and financial institutions, with particular emphases on control, regulation and corporate failure. He is the author of Financial Market Analytics and Governance and the Market for Corporate Control and coauthor of Quantitative Methods for Finance and Investments. Dr. Teall was awarded his Ph.D. in Finance from New York University and is a former member of the American Stock Exchange where he traded stock options as a market maker. He has also consulted with numerous financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, DeutscheBank, National Westminster Bank and Citicorp.

Reception to follow the event.

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This event is part of Lally’s Innovation Event Series 2009-2010: “Doing Business in an Era of Significant Change.”

These weekly dialogues explore new and emerging ideas across a range of management fields, including Finance, Technology Commercialization, Energy, Information Technology, Healthcare, Globalization, and Ethics.