Ben Falcone

BlackRock Advisors offers investors around the world a variety of investment products that span across asset classes, market-caps, investment styles and geographic regions. Their mandates include cash management, equity, fixed income, alternative, multi-asset and quantitative equity strategies.

Invesco Advisers provides a variety of services across a broad spectrum of investment strategies, sectors and asset classes. The firm utilizes several different methodologies, each predicated on a rigorous, bottom-up, value-oriented security selection process.

MLAM's worldwide approach to equity investing uses a philosophy of identifying relative value among individual stocks and stock markets by focusing primarily on two variables: reinvestment rate and the price-to-book value ratio. There are seven additional screens employed to further refine the process. The factors used to identify value include price-to-cash flow, price-to-earnings ratios, past and future earnings growth and dividend payouts. For asset allocation, a country whose market valuation measurements seem consistently above or below world averages or its own historical averages are over or under-weighted accordingly. The degrees of over or under-weighting are determined by relative economic prospects as measured by the outlook for GNP, inflation and interest rates of each country and their impact on currency movements. By combining a value approach to individual stock selection with asset allocation by country, the firm seeks to achieve consistent performance relative to international equity indexes. MLAM combines top-down and bottom-up analysis and uses proprietary models as part of their research process. Their funds are team-managed.

Provides brokerage services

Echo Point Investment Management is a global growth equity investment firm that seeks to: (1) construct high-conviction, fully-diversified portfolios of high-quality growth companies and (2) outperform the benchmark by 200 to 300 basis points (annualized) over time. Their fundamental growth equity investment process is a disciplined, repeatable process that seeks to identify high-quality growth companies against a 3 to 5-year investment horizon, while actively monitoring and managing risk. In particular, Echo Point seeks to identify well-managed managed companies that have been successful, as the firm believes these companies generally tend to continue to be successful. The firm's investment approach is also based on the belief that minimizing losses is critical to maximizing returns. Echo Point's investment process is based on a consistent, bottom-up security selection process that is based on rigorous fundamental research. Prior to being included in a portfolio, the following characteristics of each potential investment are evaluated: (1) the company's market position (2) the company's strategy for future growth (3) the company's sustainable competitive advantage (4) the strength of the company's balance sheet and (5) the reasonableness of the company's valuation. In addition to third-party research, Echo Point's portfolio managers and analysts meet with virtually all of their portfolio companies' management teams to qualify company-specific drivers. Echo Point's investment process begins with an initial screening referred to as 'Alphascore.' This screen reduced the universe of stocks of 30,000 to 300. The firm uses fundamental analysis to identify key investment themes. Portfolios are constructed which consist of 60 to 80 high-quality mid-cap and large-cap stocks from every region of the world. With the objective of delivering strong relative performance, Echo Point executes a consistent growth style, along with sector, region and emerging market collars. Their strategy is available as a separate account in local shares or ADRs.

Functions as a College/University