On December 2 in the Trading Room at Bentley University, Eaton Vance and the Boston Companies presented their annual investment performance for $200 million of the Florida-based Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund. In addition to 20 Bentley undergraduate and graduate students who participated, Peter Sleiman, a fund trustee whose son, Paul, attends Bentley, was also on hand for the unprecedented presentation.
“As a trustee of the pension fund, I realized that I could help further Bentley’s goal to blend classroom education with real world business environments by having some of our money managers present their annual board of trustees performance review to students at Bentley,” notes Sleiman.
Bentley Finance Professor Jahangir (Jay) Sultan and Trading Room Manager Richard Gibble worked with Sleiman to facilitate the program. “There was very good interaction between the presenters and the audience, “ says Sultan, Gibbons Professor of Finance and founding director of the Hughey Center for Financial Services/Trading Room. “Students learned about the specific mandates of the pension fund and how these investment mandates are implemented to provide safe and enhanced returns for the fund, with a look at recent performance during the credit crisis.”
The money-manager presentation explored undervalued stocks with good potential, and the importance of researching international stocks by visiting countries to study the economy, the business climate, and the company. Following the presentation, the floor was open to a series of questions and exchanges between the students and the money managers. According to Dan Holmes of Summit Advisors, the Funds advising consultant, “The quality, depth and insight of the questions asked by the Bentley students were outstanding and very impressive.”
As the centerpiece of Bentley University’s Hughey Center for Financial Services, the Trading Room is a multimillion dollar state-of-the-art facility for teaching financial analysis and risk management. The facility offers real-time data feeds from major equities, fixed income, futures, options exchanges, and over-the-counter markets from the U.S. and overseas. It is also used for conducting corporate training seminars on securities trading, portfolio, financial econometrics, risk management, and business strategy.