Teaching Team

LFS Faculty (alphabetical order)

At London Financial Studies we are able to attract prominent practitioners and academics all of whom have a clear and thorough grasp of their subjects and wide practical experience. They are all expert communicators with the ability to impart their knowledge in a clear and engaging way.

Simon Acomb

Dr Simon Acomb has over 16 years experience in quantitative finance. He started his career in finance at Barclays deZoete Wedd in 1992 in the Equities Derivatives Group and progressed to run the quantitative research team. This was followed by five years at Commerzbank where he established a derivatives proprietary trading team and then became head of the equity quantitative research group. Most recently Simon has been a managing director at Morgan Stanley as global head of the Equities Analytic Modelling Group. He now works as a consultant and trainer in mathematical finance.

Volatility: Trading and Managing Risk - London

Volatility: Trading and Managing Risk - New York

William Allen

 William Allen was previously a senior associate consultant with Seabrook Associates in Boston, Massachusetts. Prior to that he worked with J.P. Morgan in various securities and derivatives trading, arbitrage, hedging, and marketing activities in London and New York.

He pursued MBA and doctoral studies in international banking and capital markets at the Harvard Business School.

William received the Elijah Watts Sells Award and the John S. Glenn Gold Medal for outstanding performance on the Certified Public Accountants (CPA) examination while he was with Ernst and Whinney, an international accounting firm.

At the same time, he was awarded the Robert Beyer Bronze Medal for outstanding performance on the Certified Management Accounting (CMA) examination. Mr. Allen also earned the professional designation of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) while serving as the chief financial and investments officer of Rhodes College.

Strategic ALM, Treasury and Capital - London

Strategic ALM, Treasury and Capital - New York

Andrew Bevan

Andrew Bevan has over 30 years of work experience in financial markets, having held various senior positions at major investment banks. In 1994, Andy was appointed Director of International Bond Research at Goldman Sachs in London.He was appointed Managing Director in 2000 and became Head of Global Markets Research, producing research and trading strategy for foreign exchange, money markets, government and corporate bonds.

In 2005 he started an independent consulting company, before joining Fulcrum Asset Management as Research Director in 2006. Andy is also a part-time lecturer in fixed income at the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) Centre. His research interests include exchange rate modelling and the integration of term structure theory with models of the business cycle in the macro-finance literature. He holds a first class BA in economics and a PhD in international monetary economics from City University. 

Macro Drivers of Asset Performance and Global TAA Strategy - London

Werner De Bondt

Werner F.M. De Bondt is director of the Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at De Paul University in Chicago and one of the founders of the field of behavioral finance. Between 1992 and 2003, he was the Frank Graner Professor of Investment Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. De Bondt studies the psychology of investors and financial markets. His research is interdisciplinary. Werner De Bondt has examined key concepts of bounded rationality, e.g., people's tendency to exaggerate the true impact of new information, their bent towards wishful thinking, or their biased perceptions of risk. De Bondt's research articles have appeared in many scholarly journals. Werner De Bondt is a frequent speaker to academics and investment professionals around the world. He holds degrees in economics, engineering, and public administration, as well as a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Cornell University (1985).

Behavioural Finance and Equity Investment Strategies - London

Behavioral Finance and Equity Investment Strategies - New York

Cheryl Brown

Cheryl Brown is one of LFS’s most experienced lecturers. Formally with Bank of America she spent ten years as a derivatives trader and client advisor and has subsequently had extensive experience of teaching at a senior level in the areas of fixed income derivatives, interest rate risk management and foreign exchange. Cheryl graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from University College London and before moving to the front office she developed Money Market processing systems for the bank.

Interest Rate Derivatives 1: Hedging and Managing Risk - London

Interest Rate Derivatives 1: Hedging and Managing Risk - New York

Peter Buerger

Peter Buerger spent over 20 years in the financial services industry, managing strategic and operative functions in Germany, the United Kingdom and other international locations.

More recently Peter worked as Global Head of Risk Control for Commerzbank Group in Frankfurt where he was responsible for the full implementation of Basel II project for the institution. He then became Head of Strategic Risk Management & Control for HypoVereinsbank / UniCredit Group in Munich. Peter was a member of the top management risk committees in both institutions.

His experience covers a broad business and product spectrum including retail banking, corporate lending, investment banking, asset management, commercial real estate and risk types: credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk / ALM, operational risk.

Peter holds an MBA from Long Island University in New York and also completed the Advanced Management Program at INSEAD.

John Calverley

John Calverley is head of research for North America at Standard Chartered Bank and was formerly chief economist at American Express Bank. John is a renowned economist and an inspirational teacher. He is also a well-known commentator on economics, appearing frequently on CNN, CNBC and Bloomberg. His books "Bubbles and How to Survive Them" and the 2009 sequel "When Bubbles Burst" are hugely popular, very readable and at the same time extremely rigorous accounts of the recent financial turmoil. His Investors Guide to Economic Fundamentals (Wiley, 2002) analysed the links between economic variables and financial markets. John is a contributor to the CFA Institute Investment Series volume, Managing Investment Portfolios, edited by John Maginn and Donald Tuttle and an advisor to the CFA Institute on the CFA curriculum. During 2000-3 he was Chairman of the UK Society for Business Economists and from 1997-2007 a Council Member of SUERF, the European Money and Finance Forum. Born and raised in the UK, educated at Cambridge University and Washington University, he now lives in Toronto.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Alberto Cherubini

Alberto Cherubini was Head of Equity Derivatives Exotic Trading at Citigroup, London,  and as such he is among the handful of people across the globe with the unique experience of running a wholesale structured book during the severe market crisis of 2008.

In his career he has traded most financial instruments, worked as a senior quant, a researcher in Nuclear Fusion (at JET Joint Undertaking), developed software in areas ranging from computational physics to industrial automation and neural networks, and received a PhD in Physics from Bologna University.

Cherubini is currently the principal consultant at EQ Finance, which he started in 2009, and teaches equity derivatives on the Masters in Mathematical Finance at the University of Bologna.

Correlation Trading and Risk Management - London

Equity Derivatives 1: Trading and Managing Vanilla Options - London

Correlation Trading and Risk Management - New York

Equity Derivatives 1: Trading and Managing Vanilla Options - New York

John Cotter

Dr. John Cotter is Professor of Finance at University College Dublin (UCD) and Research Fellow at UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. He has held visiting appointments at UCLA, London School of Economics and ESSEC Business School.

He is renowned for his work in risk management and has published many technical articles in leading international publications. He teaches on various executive programmes, and commonly receives 'Best Teacher' awards. Dr. Cotter was awarded an Outstanding Educator at UCD in 2003 and has consulted for many leading organisations including Fortune 500 companies and Government bodies.

David Cox

Dr. David Cox has wide practical experience of the financial markets and an international reputation as a teacher of high-level short courses to the financial sector. His career includes ten years in banking, primarily with Bank of America Capital Markets. After leaving The City he joined the staff of London Business School, as part of LBS Financial Software Ltd, where he set up the financial markets seminar programme and engaged in doctoral research. Dr. Cox runs regular seminars for the International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering in Geneva and specialises in quantitative techniques, risk management and derivative products. Clients include central banks, a wide range of international investment and commercial banks and broking houses. He is also a director of LFS.

Interest Rate Derivatives 2: Structured Products - London

Using Inflation Derivatives in Today's Market - London

Implementing Fundamental Quantitative Techniques - London

Index Linked Bonds and Inflation Derivatives - New York

Interest Rate Derivatives 2: Structured Products - New York

Interest Rate Derivatives 1: Hedging and Managing Risk - Singapore

Dan Crisan

Dan Crisan is a Professor in Mathematics at Imperial College London. His expertise is in the area of Stochastic Analysis with applications in Engineering and Finance. He has published over 30 articles in journals world-wide and his current research involves developing high-order numerical algorithms for solving stochastic and deterministic partial differential equations, approximating schemes for backward stochastic differential equations and particle methods for nonlinear filtering.

His book "Fundamentals of Stochastic Filtering" was published by Springer Verlag in their prestigious series Stochastic Modelling and Applied Probability. He has just completed the editorial work on "The Oxford Handbook of Nonlinear Filtering" - an advanced monograph on the subject. Professor Crisan is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematics and Computation published by the London Mathematical Society. He has developed and taught a course on Numerical Stochastics within the MSc programme in Mathematical Finance at Imperial College London.

Intermediate Mathematics: Understanding Stochastic Calculus - London

Intermediate Mathematics: Understanding Stochastic Calculus - New York

Paul Darbyshire

Paul Darbyshire is involved in the active management of several capital funds and the provision of dynamic portfolio optimisation models and innovative investment strategies to several major financial organisations around the globe. He has worked in London and New York as a quantitative trader in exotic currency options and structured products, and also provided major banks, financial institutions and private equity houses with consultancy in quantitative finance, computational modelling and risk management.

Paul also carries out advanced research at the University of Oxford developing behavioural finance models and computational systems that may prove useful in applications such as adaptive financial learning, artificial intelligence and algorithmic trading design. He holds a PhD in Quantum Physics, has published a number of articles in world class journals and is writing a book on 'Hedge Fund Modelling and Analysis' due for publication in 2011 by Wiley Finance Series.

Hedge Fund and Investment Analysis - London

Hélyette Geman

Hélyette Geman is Director of the Commodity Finance Centre at the University of London and ESCP Europe. For the last 21 years she has been a scientific advisor to major financial institutions, insurance companies and energy, commodity and mining companies including Louis Dreyfus, BHP Billiton, EDF Trading, Bunge and Office Cherifien des Phosphates. Prof. Geman was previously Head of Research at Caisse des Depots in Paris and is a Member of the Board of the UBS-Bloomberg Commodity Index.

Hélyette Geman has published 126 papers in top international finance and insurance Journals and two books by Wiley Finance including Commodities and Commodity Derivatives: Energy, Metals and Agriculturals which became the reference in the field. Her research includes catastrophic insurance, commodity spot and forward curve modeling, valuation of physical assets in the mining and agriculture industry, as well as exotic option pricing.

She is a graduate of Ecole Normale Superieure in Mathematics, holds a Masters degree in Theoretical Physics, a PhD in Probability from the University Pierre et Marie Curie and a PhD in Finance from the University Pantheon Sorbonne.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Commodities and Commodity Derivatives - London

Commodities and Commodity Derivatives - New York

Morton Glantz

Prof. Morton Glantz is an internationally recognized educator, author and banker. As a senior officer of JP Morgan Chase he specialised in credit analysis and credit risk management, risk grading systems, valuation models and professional training. He is a principal of Real Consulting and Real Options Valuation, firms specializing in risk consulting, training, certification, and advanced analytical software in the areas of risk quantification, analysis, and management solutions. Glantz is on the finance faculty of the Fordham Graduate School of Business and has appeared in the Harvard University International Directory of Business and Management Scholars and Research. Prof. Glantz is widely published in financial journals and has authored six books including The Bankers Handbook on Credit Risk: Implementing Basel II (2008). He was recently invited by Yale School of Management to join a working group to debate the future of risk management after the 2008 financial crisis.

Jon Gregory

Dr Jon Gregory has over ten years experience as a practitioner in quantitative finance and is a partner at the capital markets consultancy Solum Financial Partners. From 1995 to 1997 he worked in the Fixed Income division of Salomon Brothers. From 1997 to 2005 he was with BNP Paribas and worked on many projects across the interest rate, equity, credit, insurance and risk management divisions. From 2005 until 2008 he was global head of credit analytics at Barclays Capital and responsible for a team of around 30 researchers globally. Jon has published a number of papers and articles on risk management, modelling and credit derivatives subjects and is a regular speaker at international conferences. He was a co-author of the book "Credit: A Complete Guide to Pricing, Hedging and Risk Management", nominated in 2001 for the Kulp-Wright award for the most significant text in risk management and insurance. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University.

Counterparty Risk, Credit Exposure and CVA - London

Modern Credit Derivatives - London

Counterparty Risk, Credit Exposure and CVA - New York

Jeremy Hawkins

Jeremy Hawkins is a highly experienced and widely respected senior practitioner with a wealth of experience at the sharp end of economic forecasting. Until very recently he was Chief Economist for Europe and head of European FX and short term interest rate strategy at Bank of America. Situated in BoA's London dealing room, his numerous appearances on CNN and the BBC provided practical and entertaining on-the-spot interpretations of a wide range of economic data and market sensitive events. Jeremy's ability at communicating ideas to his audience is well known and his reputation for "getting the numbers right" is legendary.

The Impact of Economic Data on Financial Markets - London

The Impact of Economic Data on Financial Markets - New York

Andre Horovitz

 

 

Credit Derivatives and Credit Structured Products - New York

Massimo Morini

Massimo Morini is currently Head of Interest Rates, Credit and Inflation Models at Banca IMI  Intesa San Paolo (where he is also responsible for coordinating Model Research). Massimo is a Professor of Fixed Income at Bocconi University and was Research Fellow at Cass Business School of London City University. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and a MSc in Economics.

Morini regularly delivers advanced training on credit modelling, interest rate market models, correlation modelling and model risk. Over the past years he has led workshops on financial modelling and the credit crunch in the main international finance conferences. His papers appeared on journals including Risk Magazine, Mathematical Finance, the Journal of Derivatives and Applied Mathematical Finance.

Managing Model Risk for Quants, Traders and Validators - London

BGM Market Models: Advances, Calibration, Smile, Pricing - London

BGM Market Models: Advances, Calibration, Smile, Pricing - New York

Eleanor J. Morrison

Eleanor J. Morrison is a commodity trading professional with 15 years experience in international commodity markets. Most recently she has traded European commodity products for Lehman Brothers in London and New York and Goldman Sachs in New York. Prior to that, Eleanor worked in commodity trading as a portfolio manager, product structurer, and quantitative model developer with Powerex, the largest mover of physical electricity in North America. She has a BSc in Chemical Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MBA from University of British Columbia, Canada. She is an experienced international presenter on commodity markets.

Rick Nason

Dr Rick Nason is a highly experienced practitioner and academic. Rick created the group and was Head of Credit Derivatives at the Bank of Montreal and he has extensive experience in all fields of derivatives. Rick is currently an Associate Professor of Finance at Dalhousie University in Canada and continues to be actively involved in derivative research, consulting and training. His particular expertise is in exotic derivatives, equity derivatives and corporate risk management. Rick is an inspirational lecturer with an international reputation. An Associate Professor of Finance at Dalhousie University, he has also taught at The University of Toronto, The University of Western Ontario and The Rotterdam School of Management.

Ser-Huang Poon

Prof. Ser-Huang Poon is a Professor of Finance at Manchester Business School and has held several visiting appointments at universities in the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, and Singapore. She is internationally renowned for her volatility research. Her work, with Nobel laureate Clive Granger, was cited on the Nobel web site as reference reading in volatility, and has won the Financial Analysts Journal Graham and Dodd Scroll Award for Excellence for 2005. She has published papers in international top ranking journals and has written three books, including a Wiley book on forecasting volatility.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Volatility: Trading and Managing Risk - London

Juan Ramirez

Juan Ramirez is currently responsible for the marketing of strategic equity derivatives to the Iberian corporate and institutional clients at BNP Paribas in London. He started his career in the consumer products group at Arthur Andersen where he spent five years gaining a substantial exposure to the accounting world. With an MBA from University of Chicago, Juan moved to London to work at Chase Manhattan (currently JP Morgan) and later Lehman Brothers, Barclays Capital and Banco Santander.

Mr. Ramirez has devoted more than 15 years to marketing structured derivatives solutions, including commodity, credit, equity, fixed income and FX. He witnessed how the first time adoption of IFRS in 2005 greatly changed the way European entities made their hedging decisions using derivatives. Since then he's been helping entities to minimise the accounting impact of highly structured derivatives transactions.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Accounting for Derivatives in Practice under IFRS9 - London

Wim Schoutens

Professor Schoutens is a research Professor in financial engineering in the Department of Mathematics at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has extensive practical experience of model implementation and is well known for his consulting work in the banking industry. Wim is also the author of Lévy Processes in Finance: Pricing Financial Derivatives and co-editor of Exotic Option Pricing and Advanced Lévy Models both published by Wiley. His research interests cover all areas of financial mathematics, and recent publications cover jump driven credit models as well as equity models, model risks, hedging of exotics and multivariate financial modelling.

He is also an independent expert advisor to the European Commission (DG-Competition) on “State aid assessment of valuation of impaired assets and of asset relief measures” and is a Managing Editor of the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance and Associate Editor of Mathematical Finance and Review of Derivatives Research.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Convertible Bonds and Securities - London

Equity Structured Products: Design, Pricing and Implementation - London

Equity Exotic Options: Calibration and Pricing - London

Tony Sims

Tony Sims has wide experience of teaching mathematical methods to students at all levels. He is MBA Course Director at Kingston University Business School and has been involved in delivering both short course and management development programmes for over 20 years. During this time he has acquired considerable practical experience through consulting projects in financial model development for business. Tony's teaching methods are both engaging and effective and he is well known for his skill in teaching mathematical concepts to people without a quantitative background.

Maths Refresher for Finance - London

Ghulam Sorwar

Dr. Ghulam Sorwar is a highly experienced finance academic with a wealth of practical experience. Following a career on the derivatives desk at Abbey Life Investment Services, he joined City University Business School where he helped to develop the MSc in Mathematical Trading and Finance and taught the numerical methods course. He is currently a full time member of the finance faculty at Nottingham University and has published widely on financial time series simulation and options pricing for risk management. Ghulam is also an energetic teacher who puts across his subject matter in a relevant and entertaining way.

Jan De Spiegeleer

Jan De Spiegeleer (Geneva, Switzerland) is head of risk management at Jabre Capital Partners, a Geneva-based hedge fund. He earned an extensive knowledge of derivatives pricing, hedging and trading while working for KBC Financial Products in London, where he was managing director of the equity derivatives desk. He also ran his own market neutral statistical arbitrage hedge fund (EQM Europe) after founding Erasmus capital in 2004.

He holds a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering (Royal Military Academy- Brussels - Polytechnic Division - 1988) and an MBA (Catholic University Leuven - 1994).

Wiley Finance Published Author.

Convertible Bonds and Securities - London

Radu Tunaru

Radu Tunaru has a PhD in Probability and Statistics and he has developed the MSc in Quantitative Finance at Cass Business School, City University in London. He worked in the City for Bank of Montreal (2006-2007) in Structured Credit Investments dealing with the cash-flow risk management models for two SIVs and the launch of one CDPC, and for Merrill Lynch (2007-2008) in Structured Finance, EMEA RMBS, dealing with prepayment models, default models, hedging products such as balance guaranteed swaps, property derivatives, equity release mortgages; working with model validation and quant teams for product development and testing. His expertise includes: probability and stochastic calculus, mathematical finance, Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Monte Carlo simulation methods for finance, derivatives pricing, credit risk, market risk, financial engineering applications for structured products, portfolio credit derivatives pricing, volatility modelling related to investment opportunities in emerging markets.

He is the recipient of Multinational Finance Journal Best Paper Award, vol 5, 2001, for the paper “Emerging Markets: Investing with Political Risk”, Eastern Finance Association prize for the Outstanding Paper in International Finance for the paper “Modelling Political Risk with a Doubly Stochastic Poisson Process”, Charleston USA 2001; and SMEED prize awarded for the best young researcher in the field, 31st UTSG Annual Conference, York 1999. He has published over 30 articles and book chapters.

Uwe Wystup

Professor Wystup is an extremely experienced practitioner in the field of foreign exchange options, a senior academic and a highly engaging teacher. He has eight years of front office experience as financial engineer, trader and structurer at UBS, Sal.Oppenheim and Commerzbank and is also Professor of quantitative finance at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Uwe is well known for his many publications on FX exotics and related topics, and his 2002 book on Foreign Exchange Risk has become a market standard. His new book on FX Options and Structured Products appeared in November of 2006 as part of the Wiley Finance series and a copy will be available for delegates.

Wiley Finance Published Author.

FX Exotic Options - London

FX Exotic Options - New York

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