To the members of the CFA Society of Nashville,
As the weather has been reminding us of late, we have entered December. With that in mind, I wanted to take a moment to extend to all of you our wishes for a happy holiday season.
With some big events that your society will be hosting on the calendar in the first quarter of 2011, I also wanted to give you an update on what we have been up to, and suggest a couple of ways you can help, particularly with the Forecast Dinner and the inaugural Investment Research Challenge.
The Fifth Annual Forecast Dinner is scheduled for Thursday night, January 13, at the Hillwood Country Club. We have two headline speakers this year:
· Russ Koesterich, CFA, is the iShares Global Chief Investment Strategist as well as the Global Head of Investment Strategy for BlackRock Scientific Active Equities. Russ has a background both as a senior portfolio manager and a director of investment strategy with BlackRock, Barclays, Instinet, and State Street. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, CNBC, and Bloomberg Television. He is also the author of The ETF Strategist (Portfolio Books), which focuses on using ETFs to manage risk and return within a portfolio.
· Lawrence Van Horn, Ph.D. is the Faculty Director of Health Care Programs at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. He is a leading expert and researcher on health care management and economics whose research on healthcare organizations, managerial incentives in nonprofit hospitals and the conduct of managed care firms has appeared in such leading publications as the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Medical Care, Medical Care Research and Review, Journal of Public Budgeting and Financial Management, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.com.
Mr. Koesterich will be giving us an overall view from his perspective as a strategist, while Mr. Van Horn will provide his view on the healthcare industry in 2011 and beyond. Your board hopes to make this type of program a tradition for the Forecast Dinner going forward, with one speaker who provides a view specific to healthcare and another who gives a broad view of the markets and the economy.
We are still looking for additional sponsors for the Forecast Dinner event. The funds we bring in through these sponsorships allow us to provide you with high quality programming through the rest of the year, generally at no cost to our members. As an incentive, we are offering two free tickets to the Dinner ($200 total value) to any member who brings in a sponsorship of $2,500 or greater, or one free ticket ($100 value) for identifying a sponsor at the $1,500 level or above. (Sorry, this offer does not apply to table sponsors.) More information on sponsorship packages is available on the event page of our website at cfanashville.org. If you have any questions or need additional information, please feel free to reach out to me, any of the board members, or Mal Clissold (who has led a planning committee for the Forecast Dinner – thanks Mal!).
You should also be receiving information on how to reserve seats and tables for the event very soon.
Following the Forecast Dinner, on Friday and Saturday, January 14-15, we will be hosting the CFA Institute’s Southeastern and Caribbean region conference. We expect to have some guests from other societies in the southeast and Caribbean area, so please show them some of our Nashville hospitality!
We are also participating for the first time in the CFA Institute’s Investment Research Challenge. This is an academic research competition, where teams from several universities prepare research reports and give presentations on a selected company, competing for the opportunity to advance to a regional competition and potentially all the way to a global competition.
We have lined up five Tennessee schools to participate in the event, and Tractor Supply has agreed to participate as the target company. Now, we need some volunteers to make this event a success:
· About 4 reader/graders are needed to grade the submitted research reports. Readers will be provided a set of guidelines to use in grading and will be asked to help at some time between February 18 (when papers are due) and March 4 (day of the presentations).
· About 4 judges will be needed to evaluate live presentations from the schools on the day of the event (March 4, likely evening or late afternoon).
Nick Warf has been coordinating this event for us. If you would be available and would like to help out, please let Nick or myself know.
We hope you have enjoyed our programming so far this year. We have a number of other great events lined up for the second half of the year, and a couple still to come in December. Stay tuned for more details, and if you see Bob Bolen, please give him your thanks for coordinating our strong schedule (and any suggestions you might have). Also, feel free to let us know if you are aware of some venues that we might want to consider for our events.
While programming is always a focus for us, we are also aware that only some of you are able to attend, and we would like to be able to add value for all of our members to the extent possible. If you have thoughts about services that we might be able to provide as a society beyond our programming, please let us know.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank Gina Rinaldi Allen, our administrator, and your 2010-11 board members for their contributions of time and energy to continue building a successful society:
Bob Bolen, Vice-President and Program Chair Michael Keeler
Christian Heuer, Treasurer Brett Rabatin
David Windley, Secretary David Stacey
Nancy Williams, Past President Nicholas Warf
Ed Burgess John Wilenski
If you would like to be a part of the board in the 2011-12 year, be sure to let some of us know!
Thank you for your participation and what you do in service of our society and profession.
Sincerely,
Ward Cullum
2010-11 President, CFA Society of Nashville