Risk-Based Investment Management in Practice

FRANCES COWELL is Director of Risk Consulting for R-Squared Risk Management, where she advises on the practical application and interpretation of portfolio risk profiles and risk management in extreme and stressed market conditions. She has worked in the investment industry for over 30 years, initially as research analyst and investment manager for public and private pension funds. She managed domestic and international equities portfolios and multi-asset class portfolios, oversaw the management of protected and guaranteed minimum return funds and managed relative value portfolios that exploited mispricing in derivatives markets. During this time she worked with leading practitioners and academics to apply established investment theory and defensive use of derivatives to practical challenges in order to deliver defined outcomes for pension and retail funds across asset classes. She was an early adherent of investment management from a risk perspective, which served her well throughout the market bubbles and shocks of the late 1980s, 1990s and of course 2007-08. For the past 15 years, she has specialized in investment risk management for multi-asset class portfolios, specialist portfolios and for in-house managed hedge funds. As Chief Risk Officer for two London investment management firms, she managed a team of professional risk managers and attended to the regulatory and governance demands of multiple investment funds.

She studied at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Graduate School of Management, earning a Bachelor of Arts and an MBA. She is an occasional contributor to industry publications on the subject of risk management for derivatives and hedge funds and is a founding director of the London Quant Group.