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Mr. Alex Gurvich will give a talk today, Thursday, at 1:30pm, in room 6-145, on "Starting a Hedge Fund"
The presentation will be an introduction to the hedge fund industry, presenting the current status on the market as well as a good non-technical primer on hedge funds. The perspective is that of a practitioner, and therefore it will be very real and very current.
Bio and background info for the talk:
Mr. Gurvich is a founding member and a Managing Partner at The Rockledge Group. He is responsible for marketing, operations and risk management.
The firm was conceived in 2004 and started trading in 2005. The three principals of the firm have over 47 years of combined institutional investment management experience from CIGNA and GE Capital, managing over $9 billion in risk controlled assets.
Rockledge work is centered on the notion that superior risk/rewards lie in the active management of passive components of markets. Rockledge anticipates a number of products in this vein as new Exchange Traded Funds continue to emerge. We see this as a logical extension to classic asset allocation arguments, the 80/20 rule. This work has been based on internal research and our own experiences. Robust intellectual support has been surprisingly lacking even among the major marketers of ETFs and that is one of the reasons we believe we are doing something new and original.
For a universe of stocks (such as the S&P 500 Index) that can be completely partitioned into segments with representative ETFs interesting possibilities present themselves. We observe that there can be significant performance dispersion among the constituent index sectors. The ability to consistently identify which sectors will out perform the overall index and which will under perform over a specified time period can lead to considerable cumulative absolute returns.
Our work here has been centered on the notion that the bulk of investment performance is attributable most consistently to proper sector selection.
This is analogous to the conclusion offered by Brinson, Hood and Beebower, further supported by Ibbotson, Kaplan and others, that proper asset class selection is responsible for the greater part of overall investment results. Moreover, the use of broadly diversified capitalization weighted market segments leads to a superior risk/return profile.
Prior to Rockledge, Mr. Gurvich was a venture capitalist with General Electric's GE Capital (GE Equity), a $5 billion private equity and venture capital fund. At GE Capital he invested and managed a $120 million technology venture capital portfolio. Mr. Gurvich was a board member at five high tech companies and was an industry practice leader in technology infrastructure investments.
Prior to GE Capital, Mr. Gurvich started and managed his own private equity firm in Moscow, Russia. There he executed several successful private equity buy outs and advisory transactions. Mr. Gurvich started his business career as a management consultant, with Bain & Co. in Moscow, London and Stockholm.
Prior to business school he worked for 5 years, as an engineer/physicist, with a French high tech scientific instrumentation start up. Prior to this he worked in the medical physics laboratory at the Harvard University.
Mr. Gurvich holds a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from INSEAD. He is also a graduate of the Venture Capital Institute.
Mr. Gurvich is fluent in three languages (English, French, and Russian) and he resides in New York since 1996.
The presentation will be an introduction to the hedge fund industry, presenting the current status on the market as well as a good non-technical primer on hedge funds. The perspective is that of a practitioner, and therefore it will be very real and very current.
Bio and background info for the talk:
Mr. Gurvich is a founding member and a Managing Partner at The Rockledge Group. He is responsible for marketing, operations and risk management.
The firm was conceived in 2004 and started trading in 2005. The three principals of the firm have over 47 years of combined institutional investment management experience from CIGNA and GE Capital, managing over $9 billion in risk controlled assets.
Rockledge work is centered on the notion that superior risk/rewards lie in the active management of passive components of markets. Rockledge anticipates a number of products in this vein as new Exchange Traded Funds continue to emerge. We see this as a logical extension to classic asset allocation arguments, the 80/20 rule. This work has been based on internal research and our own experiences. Robust intellectual support has been surprisingly lacking even among the major marketers of ETFs and that is one of the reasons we believe we are doing something new and original.
For a universe of stocks (such as the S&P 500 Index) that can be completely partitioned into segments with representative ETFs interesting possibilities present themselves. We observe that there can be significant performance dispersion among the constituent index sectors. The ability to consistently identify which sectors will out perform the overall index and which will under perform over a specified time period can lead to considerable cumulative absolute returns.
Our work here has been centered on the notion that the bulk of investment performance is attributable most consistently to proper sector selection.
This is analogous to the conclusion offered by Brinson, Hood and Beebower, further supported by Ibbotson, Kaplan and others, that proper asset class selection is responsible for the greater part of overall investment results. Moreover, the use of broadly diversified capitalization weighted market segments leads to a superior risk/return profile.
Prior to Rockledge, Mr. Gurvich was a venture capitalist with General Electric's GE Capital (GE Equity), a $5 billion private equity and venture capital fund. At GE Capital he invested and managed a $120 million technology venture capital portfolio. Mr. Gurvich was a board member at five high tech companies and was an industry practice leader in technology infrastructure investments.
Prior to GE Capital, Mr. Gurvich started and managed his own private equity firm in Moscow, Russia. There he executed several successful private equity buy outs and advisory transactions. Mr. Gurvich started his business career as a management consultant, with Bain & Co. in Moscow, London and Stockholm.
Prior to business school he worked for 5 years, as an engineer/physicist, with a French high tech scientific instrumentation start up. Prior to this he worked in the medical physics laboratory at the Harvard University.
Mr. Gurvich holds a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from INSEAD. He is also a graduate of the Venture Capital Institute.
Mr. Gurvich is fluent in three languages (English, French, and Russian) and he resides in New York since 1996.
Gurvich is quite a figure in financial markets, I missed a chance... Of those who attended, had you guys made any notes?
