Certificate FAME welcomes enrollees to the 2008 program

Organizers of the Certificate in Financial Asset Management and Engineering (CFAME) program would like to welcome participants in the 2008 program.

Program manager Laura Skerrett has been evaluating the applicants and is looking forward to the program getting underway on July 21st.

Last year's CFAME coincided with the onset of the global credit crisis, and participants enjoyed an expert narration of financial events as they unfolded. Participant Mohammed AlQatari commented, "When the subprime crisis started, we were studying credit default probabilities and CDS. It was tangible...".

You might be interested to visit the photo gallery of last year's program. The photo shown left was taken at the 2007 graduation event, held at the Olympic Museum Lausanne.

Automated trading and the doctoral work of former Zurich Stock Exchange CEO

Earlier, I mentioned that former Zurich Stock Exchange CEO Dr Richard Meier (pictured) had given an excellent presentation at the 2008 Zurich SFI Doctoral Dinner about the development of automated trading.

Dr Meier described his research as a finance doctoral student in the 1960s, a period when the finance industry began in earnest to harness computers in financial trading. As a doctoral student, Meier found himself writing an important report about the feasibility of automated trading.

His research was revealing that a key challenge for the development of automated trading was the cumbersome interface between man and machine. "The automated trading technologies seen later, in the 1980s, were the product of a lengthy period of development in the field of man-machine interaction," he said.

Globalization has also shaped the evolution of automated trading. As financial trading became more global, connecting traders at a global level came to be more important than sustaining the extremely high level of interconnectivity between traders at a local level, explained Meier.

"Automation became a necessity in this context, so globalization has really helped the development of automated trading", he said.

The next event on the SFI Doctoral calendar is the Swiss Doctoral Workshop in Finance, Study Centre Gerzensee, June 2-3 2008.

Institute-affiliated ETH Professor says response to banking crisis must apply across entire industry

ETH Professor Didier Sornette, a member of the Swiss Finance Institute, is interviewed in a recent news report (AFP) about the credit crisis and warns that actions to address such issues as subprime banking losses would necessitate wide-spread involvement of the international banking community.

"You can't blame Credit Suisse or UBS [only]... because they were playing the same game as the rest of the sector", he explained in the AFP interview published on April 26th.

These sentiments are echoed by Financial Times journalist Dr Haig Simonian in a news item on Swiss banking regulation published earlier last month. Swiss Federal Banking Commissioner Daniel Zuberbühler believes that the priority should be for regulators around the world to collectively learn lessons from the crisis.

Professor Sornette became a member of the Swiss Finance Institute following an agreement made last year between the Swiss Finance Institute and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. His research focuses on the prediction of crises in complex systems.

2008 wealth and tax planning Retreat begins

Top finance experts from throughout Europe and beyond assembled this morning for the first day of the Swiss Finance Institute's International Wealth and Tax Planning Retreat in Lucerne, central Switzerland.

Participants in the 5 day residential seminar came to deepen their knowledge of international taxation and exchange experiences about serving the wealth management needs of high net worth individuals.

Leading the first day of the seminar was Marc-Etienne Pache (pictured, right), Partner at Oberson Avocats in Lausanne and Geneva. In the course of an interactive discussion with fellow Oberson tax expert Fouad Sayegh, Dr Pache detailed solutions for double taxation conflicts, including an up to the minute review of international wealth taxation law.

Later this week, the Retreat will hear presentations from various wealth and tax specialists including Dr. Kurt Moosmann, an expert in advising private entrepreneurs and business owners, and tax law polymath Philip Marcovici. CEO of Zurich-based LawInContext and Partner at Baker & McKenzie, Marcovici is an active member of the American and the Canadian bar association, and of the Canadian Tax Foundation in Switzerland.

Photograph courtesy of Adrian Wipf.