Midway to CFAME

Participants in the 2008 Certificate in Financial Asset Management and Engineering course (CFAME) have reached the mid point of the 5 week program this week with presentations on Market and Credit Risk Management.

Institute Senior Chair Erwan Morellec and Assistant Professor Tony Berrada presented the tools needed to size up the risks facing financial institutions large and small. Earlier in the week saw presentations by Olivier Scaillet, whose work on estimating outperformance among fund managers featured recently in the New York Times.

CFAME's Class of 2008 displays the international mix so characteristic of program, with two thirds of the class coming from outside Switzerland. I spoke with financial planner Philip Amery (pictured, right), who'd made the journey from Adelaide, Australia and medical graduate Ahmed Alsaleh, and learned about the opportunities available to numerically-savvy financial folks around the globe. Both saw great opportunities in these challenging times.

Very refreshing.

ETH Member of Institute gives lecture on parallels between financial crashes and disturbances in nature

Professor Didier Sornette (photo) presented insights into the workings of financial crises at a special presentation to ETH Alumni last Thursday evening.

Sornette, who is a member of the Swiss Finance Institute faculty, holds the ETH Chair of Entrepreneurial Risk at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics.
The Department is one of several ETH research departments involved in an agreement with the Swiss Finance Institute, signed last December, that enables selected ETH faculty to become affiliated with the Institute.

Originally trained in the physical sciences, Didier Sornette's ideas about financial crises appear regularly in the press. He recently commented on the involvement of Swiss banks in the credit crisis that continues to affect the stability of global financial markets.

Launch of the Senior Management Program in Geneva

Next week marks the official start of the Institute's new executive education offering, the Senior Management Program in Banking. The first study block of the program starts on Monday and takes place in Geneva at the Hotel de la Paix.

Patrick Odier, Managing Partner at Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, will give the plenary lecture at a special opening event next Monday evening that is jointly hosted by Geneva Financial Center and the Swiss Finance Institute.

Held at Restaurant du Parc des Eaux Vives, Geneva, the invitation-only event will assemble banking director generals and CEOs from international banks and other leading financial service organizations.

Over the next 6 months, the 25 participants of the program will meet again in London, Frankfurt and Madrid where they will attend week-long study blocks on the latest strategic thinking in the banking industry.

The program will open on Monday morning with an introductory lecture by SFI Director of Executive Education Dr Harry Hurzeler (photo) and Program Director Dr Silvia Gerber.

Mathematician’s move to finance yields place at prestigious Duke University

More news of our doctoral graduates achieving the critical first rung on the finance faculty ladder as Lukas Schmid joins the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

With a background in pure mathematics from ETH Zurich, Lukas made the move to finance with a desire to apply quantitative methods to real-world problems. His research aims to integrate corporate finance and asset pricing literatures with a focus on quantitative aspects.

Lukas entered the job market at this year’s American Finance Association meeting in January following a similar path to Sébastien Michenaud, whom I mentioned in a previous posting.

At the Meeting, Lukas was invited for a staggering 38 interviews, which he managed to translate into 19 so-called “flyout offers”: invitations for on-campus interviews at top tier universities in Europe and North America.

I first met Lukas at the 2006 Doctoral Workshop just before he set off for a visiting scholarship at the Wharton School. He went on to win the 2007 Grandchamp prize for best PhD thesis.

Lukas completed his PhD at the University of Lausanne supervised by Professor Jean-Pierre Danthine.

He will take up his position at Duke on July 1.

Second opinions in finance at Gerzensee doctoral workshop

By day's end of the opening of the 2008 Gerzensee meeting, the busy meeting schedule saw 6 research presentations from faculty, 18 doctoral presentations, a meeting of the General Assembly and a plenary lecture by Felix Kubler on robust computational experiments in finance.

The focus of the 2 day event is the doctoral workshop. Students are encouraged to present relatively early drafts of their research, rather than work that is nearer to publication. Each early draft paper is distributed to a single student discussant and to a member of faculty that is not directly supervising the research.

Students are very positive about this arrangement. They gain a critical review of their research from a fellow student, and insights from faculty. These second opinions (this is how one student described the process) can bring focus to preliminary results and can identify blind spots in otherwise well made research plans.

I’ll be following up this post with posts about individual attendees at the meeting, including students and professors who presented their work, and from other finance researchers that assembled at Gerzensee during the these intense two days past.

There is a full photo gallery of the event posted here.

Photos courtesy of Adrian Wipf.

Annual research meeting opens at Gerzensee

During the next few days, students and faculty of the Swiss Finance Institute will assemble at Gerzensee Study Centre, near Bern, for an annual research workshop.

The two-day meeting is largely devoted to research presentations, but also features a general assembly meeting of the Swiss Finance Institute, and of Finrisk, the Swiss National Science Foundation’s research project on Financial Valuation and Risk Management.

An important part of the meeting is the Doctoral Workshop. Students of the SFI doctoral program present their research and receive feedback from fellow students and faculty.

The student presentations are much anticipated events. Each student will not only present their own work, but also make a presentation on the work of fellow students in the program.

Prizes are awarded for the best research presentation, and also for the best presentation on a fellow student’s work, the so-called “best discussant” award.

The photo shows the first group of students shortly after they arrived on Sunday evening.

Founded by the Swiss National Bank, the Gerzensee Study Centre is an education and training centre for central bankers and economists. Though only 18 minutes by train from Bern, the Centre offers a kind of isolated splendor with fantastic views of the Swiss Alps.

I will reporting on the event during the next few days.

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.