Larry Speidell | SpeakerHub

Personal Details

Bio

Larry Speidell is Chief Investment Officer of Frontier Global Partners, sponsor of the Frontier Market Select Fund, which invests in frontier stock markets around the world.

He travels widely and has researched companies in many places, including Abu Dhabi, Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Dubai, Ghana, India, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malawi, Mozambique, Pakistan, Palestine, Paraguay, Romania, Qatar, Senegal, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Larry is the author of the 2011 CFA Institute Research Foundation monograph, "Frontier Market Equity Investing: Finding the Winners of the Future."

From 2003 to 2006 he was Executive Vice President at Laffer Associates, an investment management and economic research firm. Prior to joining Art Laffer, Larry was a Partner and Director of Global Research and Management at Nicholas Applegate where he launched the firm’s emerging markets products and developed and enhanced the firm's international and global quantitative disciplines. Larry also spent eleven years as a Trustee at Batterymarch Financial Management where he was a portfolio manager for domestic and international strategies, was responsible for one of the first equity funds in China and worked on the development of a fund for Russia. As Senior Vice President and portfolio manager at Putnam Management Company from 1971 to 1983, Larry served as a member of that firm's Investment Policy Committee.

He is serves on the board of the CFA Society San Diego and is a past president of the Boston Securities Analysts Society and a past director of the Investor Responsibility Research Center in Washington, D.C. Prior to the investment business, Larry earned his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University and his M.B.A. from Harvard University. He served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.

Current position (1)

Chief Investment Officer

Frontier Global Partners

Achievements (1)

CFA Charterholder

Degrees (1)

Finance

Harvard Business School

1964 to 1966

Presentations

Presentations (5)

The World Looking Back from 2050

We start with a look back at the primitive times of the 1990s and then fast forward to 2050 to see where countries and economies fit in the global economy.
Understand the ways that resources, human capital, rule of law, and luck will play a part in the future of developed and developing markets
Among other changes, the generic notions of "emerging" and "frontier" markets will be replaced by differentiation based on macro standards of economics and politics along with micro skills at the corporate and security levels. Who will the winners and losers be?

Active versus Passive Investing in Frontier Stock Markets

As investors are starting to look beyond emerging markets to frontier markets for favorable growth and demographic trends, they are confronted with challenges ranging from a lack of liquidity and nascent capital markets, to unfamiliar political and business risks. We examine trading volume, bid-asked spreads and analysts coverage across 1,000 stocks in 30 frontier countries. Then we compare manager results over ten years to see if active management has a future in these neglected markets.

Frontier Stock Markets: The Next to Join the Emerging World

As globalization progresses, the role of "frontier" markets is growing in the world of investing. These are markets in countries not included in the current benchmarks of MSCI EAFE and Emerging Markets. There is strong evidence that investors should open up their horizons to include over 60 small stocks markets in frontier countries. They present significant opportunities, are priced attractively and have low correlations with other markets. They also include many excellent companies and a growing number of CFA charterholders. Finally, they are home to 1 billion people who can benefit from our investment in them, while we can benefit from the fruits of their progress.

Behavioral Finance − The Human Element...in Individual and Institutional Investing

The problem with finance is that markets are almost rational, but not quite. Understanding our emotional instincts can help us to make better, more profitable investment decisions. We examine the latest research in behavioral finance, in the areas of self-deception, oversimplification and social interaction, including representativeness, self-attribution bias, overconfidence, empathy gap, myopic loss aversion, trust, and committee behavior.

Revenge of the Third World

Henry Kissinger once said that we are "at the end of an era"...
The end of the Cold War and reforms in China opened world markets to 1.5 billion people, many of them working at wages less than one tenth of those in the developed world. Over the past thirty years, globalization has become a reality, with interlocking supply chains delivering high quality products at low cost worldwide.
An unintended consequence of this has been the hollowing out of developed world economies and a rising cohort of angry voters in search of solutions. Now serious questions are being asked about globalization, free trade and flexible labor markets, while populism and protectionism are providing simple answers.
Meanwhile, the third world is gaining strength - and presenting opportunities for investors. We will look at the
projections for 115 developed, emerging and frontier countries in terms of human capital, investment flows and government quality to gauge their outlook. Then we will project growth ra