GUEST SPEAKERS
Larry Powell
Larry Powell, as Deputy CIO co managed the Utah Retirement Fund, a $25B US Public Pension Plan. Mr. Powell joined URS in 2008, he was ultimately responsible for the oversight and management of the investment team, analyzing deals and investing in all global public and private market asset classes. He worked with the URS investment team in all aspects of the investment management process, including manager sourcing, due diligence, buy/sell decisions, fee and term negotiations as well as the tactical and strategic investing of the URS portfolio.
Prior to joining URS, Mr. Powell served as Managing Director, External Public Markets (EPM) at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. In this position, Mr. Powell managed a team of ten professionals who collectively oversaw all of TRS’ global investments in external managers within equities, fixed income and hedge funds. The EPM portfolio represented approximately 1/3 of all TRS’ assets estimated at $100billion.
Previously, Mr. Powell was President and Chief Investment Officer of a macro hedge fund firm, which he founded in 1987. He holds a B.S. degree with a dual concentration in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Mark Jeffries
Former Merrill Lynch stockbroker turned author and Keynote Speaker, Mark Jeffries, has become a trusted adviser and communications consultant to some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. He speaks at and moderates conferences, summits, sales meetings, user forums and conventions all over the world for clients including IBM, Ernst & Young, SAS, HP, Zurich Insurance, Gartner, Microsoft, Royal Bank of Canada, Deltek & Bank of America.
With his depth of event experience, many of Mark’s clients now also use him as an event consultant, working alongside the production team to create an event with audience appeal, a memorable impact and an effective message.
Dividing his time between The United States, Canada and Europe, Mark’s ideas, inspiration and guidance, are sought across virtually all industries.
Denise Shull
Denise Shull, a neuroeconomist and author, founded The ReThink Group in 2003 in order to solve the vexing problem of human misperception of risk. For over ten years, Shull has coached Wall Street professionals, offering techniques to avoid their typical behavioral responses to fear and greed. She specializes in separating intuition -- felt knowledge -- from impulse.
Shull started her trading career at the Chicago Board Options Exhange and later traded futures as a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It was at that time that she began transforming neuroeconmics - the new science of the brain on risk - into investing profits. She is a frequent speaker at industry and academic conferences, is often quoted in prominent business, risk, neuroeconomic and psychological publications and has appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box, CBS Sports, Bloomberg TV, Cavuto, PBS and The Discovery Channel.
Shull graduated from Harvard Kennedy’s executive program in “Investment Decisions and Behavioral Finance” in 2009 and holds a Master of Arts in neuroscience (1995) from The University of Chicago. Her thesis research, “The Neurobiology of Freud’s Repetition Compulsion” was published in 2003 in the Annals of Modern Psychoanalysis and was cited in 2013 as one of the earliest papers in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis.