Meredith Milazzo

Provides credit and charge cards, payments and online platforms solutions

Owns and operates resorts, restaurants & bars

Drake specializes in active global fixed-income strategies. They manage both benchmarked and absolute return oriented portfolios. Absolute return offerings include a multi-sector, primarily fixed-income oriented strategy; a global macro, opportunistic fund; and a short maturity, carry oriented strategy. Benchmarked mandates include US and global bond fund strategies which can be tailored to meet the needs of institutional investors. Drake's investment strategies are based on the principle of diversification and exploiting the performance advantages of managing a relatively smaller aggregate asset base with a flexible investment process. They believe that no single risk should dominate returns. By diversifying a portfolio or employing multiple sources of value added, Drake seeks to generate attractive excess returns with reasonable variability within the context of the market environment. They look to add value through the use of top-down strategies such as actively managing a portfolio's exposure to interest rates, changing market volatility, yield curve positioning and sector rotation. The firm also employs bottom-up strategies involving the relative analyses of comparable instruments and selection of specific securities. By combining investment styles and focusing on both portfolio level and security level strategies, Drake attempts to position client portfolios and their funds to benefit from attractive excess returns while incurring acceptable levels of risk. Drake's investment process is designed to construct portfolios that integrate longer-term secular economic trends with sector / security level analyses. The first step is the formulation of the Drake View which involves harnessing the collective input of the portfolio management team and international research offices. This unique market view serves as the basis for investment decisions and sector allocations made across all of Drake's portfolios, regardless of the product. In developing the Drake View, the portfolio management team places significant emphasis on understanding and monitoring long-term or secular influences on the world economy and financial markets. Using the Drake View as the fundamental backdrop, Drake's sector teams then identify assets whose current value is inconsistent with the themes inherent in the Drake View. These opportunities are then implemented by the various sector teams, who are also responsible for monitoring and adjusting portfolio positioning as market conditions evolve. Having identified a set of positions, the portfolio management team applies their best forecast of expected return over the relevant time horizon. This varies with the type of position, with some having an intra-day horizon and others having up to a one-year time frame. Volatilities are then assigned, allowing the creation of ex-ante Sharpe ratios for the different strategies. The positions with the best risk return trade-off (highest Sharpe ratios) tend to be the larger risk positions.

Provides auditing, financial advisory and tax consulting services

Functions as a College/University

Cerberus Capital invests in middle-market companies located in across the globe. The firm focus on a broad range of sectors and industries. It provides financing for buyouts and distressed debt capital transactions.

Lyford Group International's primary investment approach focuses on liquid tactical trading to complement the firm's fundamental macro-economic views. They manage the Lyford Fund, a discretionary, tactically opportunistic global macro hedge fund that actively manages positions in equity indices, fixed-income, commodity and currency instruments using fundamental research and technical analysis. Lyford primarily trades highly liquid futures and options. A large proportion of the fund's assets are maintained in cash. The fund seeks double-digit returns while controlling volatility and maintains a negative correlation to most major indices and benchmarks. The Lyford Fund has two different books. Up to 30% of the positions consist of longer-term theme trades of one week to 3 months. These trades represent strong views that the firm expects to play out over time and are sized to handle intra-day volatility without breaching set risk parameters. All positions that Lyford anticipates will have more than 80% correlation to one another are part of the same theme. The remaining 70% of the book focuses on a short-term tactical approach that seeks to take advantage of events on the economic calendar, intra-day price action, asset reversion to the mean, anticipation of correlation breakdowns across a variety global markets and dynamic hedging of long-term themes. Lyford's risk management efforts include a strict stop-loss of 3% of net asset value on all longer-term theme trades and from 10 to 50 basis points of NAV on all short-term trades. The also have an overall hard stop-loss of 6% of NAV in any one month. Once they approach the 6% level, the firm begins to pare down positions in the portfolio and reduce their value at risk. If that level is reached at any time, they will close out all positions. The liquidity of the instruments Lyford trades allows them to collapse the portfolio in a very short time span. Lyford performs a value at risk analysis of their portfolio on a daily basis using Riskmetrics. The previous 30 trading days are used to calculate the correlation of assets. Riskmetrics is also used to determine how a position would increase or decrease the value at risk in the firm's total portfolio and a 95% VaR is closely evaluated. Lyford also performs an internal risk analysis based on their view of correlation and volatility and converts all assets to an S&P futures contract equivalent weighting. The portfolio usually has an average margin/equity ratio of 10%.