Author Backgrounds:
Mohnish Pabrai is the Managing Partner of the Pabrai Investment Funds and Dhandho Holdings. Since inception in 1999 with $1 million in assets under management, Pabrai Investment Funds has grown to over $690 million in AUM with an annualized gain of 17.7% (versus 5.2 % for the Dow). He is the author of two books, including The Dhandho Investor. Mohnish is also is the Founder and Chairman of the Dakshana Foundation, which is focused on providing world-class educational opportunities to economically and socially disadvantaged gifted children worldwide.
Guy Spier is the manager of Aquamarine Fund, an investment partnership inspired by the original 1950’s Buffett partnerships. In 2007 he made headlines by bidding $650k with Mohnish Pabrai for a charity lunch with Warren Buffett. Guy recently published his first book, The Education of a Value Investor. In 2009, Spier and his family moved from New York to Zurich, Switzerland to escape the noise of Wall Street. He attained his MBA from Harvard Business School and has a First Class degree in Economics from Oxford University. He spoke at TED India and co-hosted TEDx Zurich.
Author Background:
Lawrence Cunningham is a leading authority on corporate governance culture and on Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett. He has written several books on value investing and is the authorized editor of The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America. A popular professor of business law at George Washington University, his latest book is Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values, in which executives from dozens of Berkshire’s subsidiaries cooperated.
Author Background:
James Grant is a financial journalist, historian, and the founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the investment markets. His new book, The Forgotten Depression, 1921: the Crash that Cured Itself, is a history of America’s last governmentally unmedicated business-cycle downturn.
Author Background:
Tobias Carlisle lives in Santa Monica, CA where he is the founder and portfolio manager of Eyquem Investment Management LLC.
He is best known as the author of the well regarded website Greenbackd.com, the book Deep Value: Why Activists Investors and Other Contrarians Battle for Control of Losing Corporations, and Quantitative Value: A Practitioner’s Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors. He has extensive experience in investment management, business valuation, public company corporate governance, and corporate law.
Prior to founding Eyquem in 2010, Tobias was an analyst at an activist hedge fund, general counsel of a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, and a corporate advisory lawyer. As a lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions he has advised on transactions across a variety of industries in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Singapore, Bermuda, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Guam. He is a graduate of the University of Queensland in Australia with degrees in Law and Business Management.
Author Background:
With a background in engineering, construction, publishing and journalism, Sam founded Centratel in 1984. He resides in Bend, Oregon, which fits with his outside interest of mountaneering, skiing, cycling, reading, and traveling. Other business enterprises include educational products, software, and consulting. Sam is founder and director of Kashmir Family Aid, a non profit aiding surviving school children of the 2005 Pakistan and Kashmir earthquake.
Author Background:
Howard Marks is an American investor and writer. After working in senior positions at Citibank early in his career, Marks joined TCW in 1985 and created and led the High Yield, Convertible Securities and Distressed Debt groups. In 1995, he left TCW and co-founded Oaktree Capital Management. In the 2011 Forbes rankings of the wealthiest Americans, Marks was ranked the #273 richest in the United States, with a net worth of $1.5 billion.
He is known in the investment community for his “Oaktree memos” to clients which detail investment strategies and insight into the economy, and in 2011 he published the book The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor.
Author Background:
Patrick O’Shaughnessy, CFA is a Principal and Portfolio Manager at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management (OSAM). Patrick is the author of Millennial Money: How Young Investors can Build a Fortune and is a contributing author to the fourth edition of What Works on Wall Street. Patrick’s is an expert in investment strategy research and investor behavior and holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.
Author Background:
By his 35th birthday, Mike Michalowicz (pronounced mi-’kal-o-wits) had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became an angel investor… and proceeded to lose his entire fortune. Then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies.
Mike is now running his third million dollar venture, is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; is the former MSNBC business make-over expert; is a popular keynote speaker on innovative entrepreneurial topics; and is the author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which BusinessWeek deemed “the entrepreneur’s cult classic.”