Pre-Summit Workshop A - Saturday 14, June 2008

Optimal Investment Analysis And Portfolio Management

Workshop Timings: Registration will be at 08.00. The workshop will commence at 08.30 and conclude at 14.30 with lunch. There will be two refreshment breaks at appropriate intervals

This intensive workshop will provide you with an understanding of investment analysis and portfolio management, through the study of the nature and functionality of global securities markets, international diversification, investment risk-return trade-off, and portfolio theory in relation to capital market efficiency hypotheses.

The Investment Environment
• Financial markets
• Financial instruments
• Risk and return calculations and historical overview

Portfolio Theory And Security Pricing
• Risk aversion and risk tolerance
• Risk tolerance and asset allocation
• Risk diversification and portfolio risk
• Constructing an optimal portfolio of two assets
• Constructing an optimal portfolio of multiple assets
• Alpha and security analysis – Where does Alpha come from?
• Practical aspects of portfolio management with the single index model

Case Analysis Session
Risk tolerance assessment and choosing portfolios that match client risk tolerance

Portfolio Performance Evaluation
• Definition of returns and alternative measurement approaches
• Time-weighted vs. Dollar-weighted returns
• The role of Alpha in performance measures
• Performance measurement with changing portfolio composition
• Market timing
• Style analysis

Case Analysis Session
Evaluating the performance of a portfolio manager

Meet your workshop leader:

Dr. Ahmad Ismail, Professor of Finance
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Dr. Ahmad Ismail is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the American University of Beirut. He was formerly an executive at the HSBC Group where his main area of expertise was in corporate banking including lending and trade services. He managed and assessed the largest corporate accounts in the group both in Lebanon and Syria.

Dr. Ismail holds an MBA from the University of Hull and a Ph.D. in finance from Warwick Business School (University of Warwick, UK), and has held visiting positions at the Loughborough University Business School in the United Kingdom since 2002. He has taught numerous courses in finance at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

His main research interests center around both corporate finance areas and financial intermediation. He has published many papers in international refereed journals on mergers and acquisitions and economic value added. His work has been presented in international conferences.

Dr. Ismail received the very competitive Chevening Scholarship from the British Council in 1994 to do his MBA in England. He was selected from 900 applicants and successfully completed the Executive Trainee Development Programme at the HSBC Group Management Training College in the UK in 1996. While he was working at HSBC Group, Dr. Ismail restructured operations in various departments and significantly improved efficiency. He increased the banks loans and credit portfolios by 20%, and enhanced profitability. He also won the bank’s service quality prize. Dr. Ismail developed and restructured many finance courses for academic and training purposes at the American University of Beirut, Warwick Business School, Gulf Investment Corporation in Kuwait and other organisations.

Workshops

A

B

C