Seminar – The Long and Short of It: Are We Asking the Right Questions? Modern Portfolio Theory and Time Horizons

Jon Lukomnik, Managing Partner, Sinclair Capital LLC

The heavy shadow of modern portfolio theory (MPT) has had a massive impact on everything from market structure, investment philosophy, and investor behavior, to the research that examines those disciplines. Researchers believe that they are casting light onto investment issues (including, for this purpose, specifically investor time horizons), but generalised acceptance of MPT allows it to continue to darken what should be enlightened.

Speaker bio

Forbes calls long-time institutional investor Jon Lukomnik one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance. Jon will be a visiting professor at Cambridge Judge Business School for Lent Term 2020. He is the managing partner of Sinclair Capital LLC, a strategic consultancy to institutional investors, and a Senior Fellow at the High Meadows Institute. Jon served for more than a decade as the executive director of the IRRC Institute where he oversaw more than 75 research projects. The IRRC Institute funded both academic and practitioner research.

Jon’s most recent book is “What they do with your money” (Yale University Press, 2016). His previous book, “The new capitalists” (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), was a Financial Times pick of the year. Both were co-written with Stephen Davis and David Pitt-Watson. He is at work on a new authored with Jim Hawley. “Modernising modern portfolio theory” (Routledge, forthcoming) focuses on MPT’s inability to deal with systematic risk, and how investors can and do mitigate risks such as climate change, income inequality, lack of diversity, and political risk. In the process, they hope to redefine what it means to “invest”. Jon is also the author of chapters in “The handbook of board governance: a comprehensive guide for public, private and not-for-profit board members” (Wiley, 2016) and “Corporate governance in the wake of the financial crisis” (United Nations, 2011).

Jon co-founded the International Corporate Governance Network and GovernanceMetrics International (now part of MSCI). He has been the investment advisor or a trustee for more than $100 billion (including New York City’s pension funds) and has consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of nearly a trillion dollars. He is a member of the Deloitte Audit Quality Advisory Committee, the Standing Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, CPA Canada’s Value Creation task force, and a trustee on the Van Eck mutual funds, insurance trusts and European UCITs.