When I got off the train in Stamford, Connecticut, I was immediately smacked by a bitter north wind from which the towers of mid-town Manhattan had apparently shielded me. I asked the cab dispatcher how far it was to my hotel. “A five minute walk, but it’s too cold for that sir.”

Too cold for mister Stamford taxi-line dude, perhaps. But like many Canadians, I felt somehow compelled to prove my cold weather “creds” and I started walking through the streets of Stamford.

While my lips froze together and I began losing feeling in my extremities, I was struck by the space-age high-tech offices of UBS, RBS, Thomson Reuters and others in what I originally thought was just an oversized bedroom community.

I was later told by CAIA members at a reception here that the gleaming UBS office I had passed by earlier in the day was the site of a gas station only a few years earlier. It’s now home to the largest columnless trading floor in the world. The RBS complex across the street was also less than ten years old. And many of the other corporate edifices were also built after the turn of the century.

Nearly 100 CAIA members and candidates work in Stamford and Greenwich. But based on the number of familiar faces at the reception, many more live up here but work downtown (see yesterday’s dispatch from New York). As usual, there was a lot of interest here in the new CAIA textbooks – particularly among long-time CAIA charter holders (of which there were several). It’s a quirk of early CAIA designees (classes of ’03-’05, for example) that many of them have memorized their charter number. I’m sure they can’t remember their driver’s license number or even, in some cases, their wedding anniversary. But their charter number seems to roll off the tongue with ease. (I know. My charter # is 340...and my wedding anniversary is sometime in early August I’m pretty sure.)

I think it has to do with the pride felt by those who took a flyer on the CAIA program before anyone had even heard about it. They helped build the foundation for the program of today at around the same time the old gas station in downtown Stamford was razed and the foundation was being laid for the gleaming new UBS building.

Christopher Holt, MBA, CAIA
Director of Industry Relations