CIFM Professional Speaker Series – Fall 2022

The Center’s Professional Speaker Series introduces financial experts, investors, and policymakers to students at UVA.  The fall 2022 semester’s series kicked off on Monday, September 19, 2022 with Tom Gayner (McIntire ’83), Co-CEO and Chief Investment Officer of the Markel Corporation, a $16 billion market cap financial holding company that primarily operates in insurance and re-insurance. Markel has many times been compared to Berkshire Hathaway in structure and performance. Tom has been the key architect of the firm’s diversification away from insurance and his talk focused on his long term approach to investing.

On October 12, 2022, Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke at the McIntire School in a joint program hosted with the UVA Department of Politics. An experienced journalist and public speaker, Mr. Mallaby contributes to a variety of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Financial Times, where he spent two years as a contributing editor. He is the author of five books, and will be joining us to discuss his most recent, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.

Finally, the semester-long series concluded with Ali Nekmouche (McIntire MS MIT ’03), Chief Data Strategist at Two Sigma, speaking to students on October 21, 2022. Two Sigma ranks as one of the largest hedge funds in the world and was founded on the belief that innovative technology and data science could help discover value in the world’s data.  Ali spoke about the firm’s investment strategy emphasizing the importance of data and technology.