September 2023: Where We’re Going, We (Really) Need Roads

Authored by Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CFP®, CIPM, FDP 

We’ve all heard some variation of the phrase “a solid foundation is the key to success.” Most of the time, we’re talking about education, morals, or technical expertise. Of course, I agree with the statement when it comes to personal development, but right now I’d like to talk more literally.

solid foundation is the key to success.

Peggy Wu, CAIA, Chapter Executive

As Vice President of Alternative Investments (‘AI’), Peggy is responsible for advancing LPL’s AI product platform to enable our financial advisors better serve their clients’ investment needs. Peggy develops the business strategy for the AI product line and works cross-functionally to implement revenue-generating initiatives. Peggy builds successful partnerships with asset managers in promoting AI education and increasing AI allocation in client portfolios.

Marc deBree, CAIA, Chapter Executive

Mark deBree, Managing Director and Head of Real Estate and Alternatives for the TIAA General Account, is responsible for developing and directing investment strategy and overseeing investment activity within the General Account’s global, multi-asset class alternatives portfolio totaling over $60 billion. This diversified portfolio includes strategies allocated across real estate equity and commercial mortgages, private equity, agriculture, timber, energy, and infrastructure. Previously, Mr.

Doug Ashburn, CAIA, Chapter Executive

Doug Ashburn, CAIA, spent more than 20 years as a derivatives market maker and asset manager before “reincarnating” as a financial media professional a decade ago. Before joining Britannica Money, Doug spent nearly six years managing content marketing projects for a dozen clients, including The Ticker Tape, TD Ameritrade’s market news and financial education site for retail investors. He has been a CAIA charter holder since 2006, and also held a Series 3 license during his years as a derivatives specialist.

Michael Going, CAIA, Chapter Head

Michael Going is a partner at Ahakista Capital, drawing on over twenty years of financial services experience in investor relations and capital raising. He has held senior roles at Merrill Lynch, Efficient Capital Management, and Subtext Investment Management, focusing on alternative investments, client relations, and business development. Michael has led nationwide initiatives in both private and public markets, developing processes for private funds and liquid quant funds, and working extensively with global institutional investors.

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) on Domain Specific Knowledge

Large language models such as Bard and ChatGPT are rooted in natural language processing models developed decades earlier. How did we get here? This presentation took us through this fascinating journey. Dr. Hossein Kazemi moderated this presentation with Avi Patel and Raul Salles de Padua who took us on a brief journey through the evolution in NLU and NLP, from word embeddings to the current state of LLMs. We shared how to leverage adoption of LLMs, Generative AI capabilities and better understand the LLM-Ops lifecycle.

Revolutionizing the Financial Industry Through Python and Open Source

Didier Rodrigues Lopes, Founder & CEO of OpenBB discussed his journey from the pain points of doing investment research and how this led him to start building his own investment research platform in Python and raising $8.8M to democratize investment research through open source. He introduced the OpenBB Terminal - the open source investment research platform, and some of its capabilities. In addition, he presented the OpenBB SDK which allows programmatic access to the data from the OpenBB Terminal, allowing quants, analysts and developers to build custom tools and dashboards. Dr.