Investment Realists

Larry Jeddeloh is Editor of The Institutional Strategist and Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer of TIS Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is an experienced investment management professional with, in 2015, thirty seven years in the business. Larry founded TIS Group in 1995. Previously, he held the position of chief investment officer of Resource Capital Advisers, with responsibilities for $1 billion in assets. Prior to joining Resource, he spent two years in Switzerland with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zürich, where he was a vice-director and the chief investment strategist in the Institutional Global Asset Management Group. For seven years in the 1980s, he was director of equity research at the Leuthold Group, a well-known institutional research firm in Minneapolis. He was also a partner of Leuthold and Anderson Investment Management Counseling and Weeden & Company, an institutional brokerage firm. Larry earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance and a Master’s of Business Administration degree from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. He has taught courses in investments and corporate finance at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern College, and Augsburg College. His work has been noted and used in various publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes, Money Magazine, Your Money, U.S. News & World Report, Barron’s, and Global Finance.

Eric Sprott has more than forty years of experience in the investment industry. After earning his designation as a chartered accountant, Eric joined Merrill Lynch as a research analyst. In 1981, he founded Sprott Securities (now called Cormark Securities Inc.), which today is one of Canada’s largest independently owned securities firms. In 2001, Eric established Sprott Asset Management Inc. His extensive list of accolades include: Canadian Investment Awards’ Opportunistic Strategy Hedge Fund Award (Sprott Hedge Fund L.P., 2004); MarHedge’s Best Canada Based Annual Performance Award (Sprott Offshore Fund Ltd., 2006); HFM Week’s Best Long/Short Hedge Fund Globally (Sprott Offshore Fund Ltd., 2008); Winner of Absolute Return’s Hedge Fund of the Year (Sprott Capital LP, 2010). Over the years, Eric has personally been the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including one of Investor Digest’s Canada’s Best Investors (2004); Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (2006); Investment Executive’s Fund Manager of the Year (2007); Advisor.ca’s Top Financial Visionary (2011); Terrapinn’s Most Influential Hedge Fund Manager (2012); and the 2012 Murray Pezim Award for Perseverance and Success in Financing Mineral Exploration (2013). More recently, Eric has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario (FCA), a designation reserved for those who demonstrate outstanding career achievements and service to the community and profession.

James Beeland Rogers was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. He started in business at the age of five by selling peanuts and by picking up empty bottles that fans left behind at baseball games. He got his first job on Wall Street, at Dominick & Dominick, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1964. Rogers then acquired a second BA degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, in 1966. He is a co-founder of the Quantum Fund and is current chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests, Inc. He is the author of several books on investment, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and other languages, as well as a biography in Chinese only.

J. Anthony (Tony) Boeckh, from 1968 to 2002, was chairman, chief executive, and editor- in-chief of Montreal-based BCA Research (previously known as BCA Publications), publisher of, among others, the highly regarded Bank Credit Analyst, a monthly big-picture analysis of the U.S. economy and financial markets. He was also chairman of Greydanus, Boeckh and Associates from 1985 to 1999, a fixed-income investment firm that managed $2 billion in assets when it was sold to Toronto-Dominion Bank in December 1999. He is currently President, Boeckh Investments Inc., and Chair of the Graham Boeckh Foundation.Tony has a Ph.D. in Finance and Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Toronto. He spent four years in the research department of the Bank of Canada in the early 1960s working in the areas of monetary and economic analysis. He taught economics and finance at McGill University in Montreal from 1968 to 1973 and has lectured at economic, financial, and investment seminars and conferences in various international centres in North America, Asia, and Europe. He recently authored The Great Reflation: How Investors Can Profit from the New World of Money, published by John Wiley in 2010, and co-authored The Stock Market and Inflation, published by Dow Jones-Irwin in 1982. He is a founding trustee of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia (an economic think tank dedicated to free-market principles). 

Dean LeBaron is an alumnus of Harvard University and a Baker Scholar graduate of the Harvard Business School. Dean is founder and former chairman of Batterymarch Financial Management. An “investment futurist,” Dean was one of the first to see the potential of quantitative investing, using computer-driven technology and modeling techniques at Batterymarch to systematically analyse data, implement trades, and manage investment portfolios. Under his leadership, Batterymarch pioneered indexing as an investment strategy. An early adopter of a contrarian philosophy, Dean followed his own advice that “in the investment field, you should be where everyone else is not,” leading Batterymarch to become one of the earliest (or first) institutional investors in Brazil, India, China, and other emerging market countries. His interest and work in Russia resulted from an invitation from the government of President Mikhail Gorbachev to help privatize the Soviet Union’s military industrial complex. Exploring the linkage of complex adaptive systems to dynamic social systems, including investments, Dean was the founding publisher of Complexity Digest in 1999. Dean is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Mao, Marx, and the Market, an account of his investment and personal experiences in China and the former Soviet Union following the demise of their command economies. His website Dean LeBaron Adventure Capitalist provides a platform for his musings, experiments with new technologies and financial innovations, video commentary, articles, and speeches. Dean earned his CFA charter in 1967 and, in 2001, was the seventh recipient of the CFA Institute’s highest honour, the Award for Professional Excellence. This award, first presented in 1991 to Sir John Templeton, was established to honour a member of the investment profession “whose exemplary achievement, excellence of practice, and true leadership have inspired and reflected honor” on the profession. Living in New England, Florida, and Switzerland, Dean strives to be the scholar and gentleman envisioned by his parents and teachers.

Donald W. Lindsey joined the American Institutes for Research as Chief Investment Officer in November 2014. Prior to that time, he was chief investment officer of George Washington University from April 2003 until October 2014, where he was responsible for management of the university’s $1.4 billion endowment. He also was a professional lecturer of finance in the GW School of Business, where he taught applied portfolio management in the MBA program. Prior to joining GWU, he established the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) in May 2000 and served as its first president and chief executive officer. UTAM was established to manage the University of Toronto’s $4.0 billion CAD in endowment and pension assets. He began his career with the University of Virginia Investment Management Company in 1987, where he served initially as investment analyst and proceeded to become assistant director of investments, senior investment officer, and director. He has taught in the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In addition, Don has appeared several times as a guest on CNBC and Toronto-based Report on Business Television. He holds the CFA designation, and has also taught CFA exam preparation and other courses in Croatia, Romania, Japan, South Africa, Italy, the U.K., and Switzerland and has served on the CFA Institute Council of Examiners. He was a member of the Investment Advisory Committee of the Virginia Retirement System from 2004 to 2014. Don holds a BA in Political Science from Virginia Tech, an MBA from James Madison University, and a Master of International Policy and Practice from George Washington University.