The Fiftyfaces Podcast

James Fletcher is the founder of Ethos Investment Management, based in Salt Lake City. He has over 19 years of investing in Emerging Market and was previously Director and Senior Portfolio Manager of the $1billion EM Small and Mid-cap fund at APG Asset Management.  Our conversation starts with the seeds that started James’s passion for Emerging Markets – an extended stay in Brazil, where he learne...

Karey Barker  is Founder and Managing Director of Cross Creek, a late-stage venture capital firm headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.  She has over 25 years of broad public and private investment experience and holds a number of Board roles, including ARUP Laboratories.  Our conversation walks through Karey's career which saw the unusual move from analysis of public equities into venture capital...

Jose Manuel Silva is Chief Investment Officer and Managing Parter at LarrainVial Asset Management in Santiago.  He has worked in finance for most of his career.  Our conversation picks up on the excellent podcast that Jose Manuel recorded with Merryn Talks Money of Bloomberg (linked here ), which is where I first came across his firm, and we build on those topics starting first with his background...

Fernando Bonardi is currently working as a family office advisor from his base in Buenos Aires. He formerly was head of BNY Mellon Investment Management in Santiago, Chile for 17 years, and prior to that held a series of financial roles. With a career that has spanned decades, Fernando has worked through many different cycles in Argentinian market history, and we discuss the evolution of his caree...

Joanne Donnelly is the CEO at the London Pensions Fund Authority, a role she has held since April of this year. She was previously Head of Pensions at the Local Government Association and prior to that worked in HM Treasury, the NHS and the UK Home Office.    Our conversation takes us from the big picture, starting with international law, which was Joanne’s original specialist area, to the local l...

Lauren Juliff is Climate and Sustainability Product Lead and Head of UK Institutional at Storebrand Asset Management UK. Her educational background is in science and she has a MSc in Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy. We start our conversation with Lauren’s background and a passion for dance that she has carried throughout her life. We mention this as a reminder to take time to nurtu...

Jose Manuel Silva, who is Chief Investment Officer and Managing Parter at LarrainVial Asset Management in Santiago.  He has worked in finance for most of his career.  Our conversation picks up on the excellent podcast that Jose Manuel recorded with Merryn Talks Money of Bloomberg (linked here ), which is where I first came across his firm, and we build on those topics starting first with his backg...

Jon Salstrom is Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer at the Cincinnati Retirement System, a role he has held for almost two years. He previously worked in a series of consulting and financial analyst roles. Our conversation starts by tracing his earlier career path, and particularly his roles in consulting which set him up well for the current role with the City of Cincinnati.   We dive...

I am delighted to launch this bonus series featuring leading financial thinkers in Latin America with this podcast with Nicolás Dujovne, recorded live in Buenos Aires in late August. Nicolás is an Argentine economist and former Minister of the Treasury between 2017 and 2019 under the administration of Mauricio Macri. He has had a long career in financial markets, primarily as an economist, and sin...

Nadia Cobalovic is Senior Vice President at Northern Trust and Global Head of Omnium Services, where she oversees teams encompassing Middle Office Operations, Back Office Administration and Data Delivery. She also contributes to business growth, strategic initiatives and new initiatives.   Our conversation starts with her early career aspirations to be a war correspondent and later, to work in U.S...

It has been an exciting summer, but we have managed to squeeze in a set of global guests for Series 4 of our 2025 Fiftyfaces Podcast – which takes us from the evolving world of hedge funds and the support infrastructure needed, to emerging market equities to late-stage venture capital to public pension pooling. We start with hearing from Nadia Cobalovic, and the evolving world of hedge fund operat...

Lisa Laird is CIO at Mercy Investment Services in St. Louis. She has previously held senior strategist roles as well as other healthcare leadership roles, and currently holds a number of additional board roles.   Our conversation starts with her dream to become a ballet dancer, and how this ultimately required a serious pivot, and we then hear about a series of financial services roles that ultima...

Nick Spencer is a senior consultant and sustainability risk specialist in the Milliman Life and Financial Services practice based in London. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and past Chair of its Sustainability Board and a past Council Member. He has written extensively on the integration of climate risks into actuarial work as well as on natural capital, biodiversity and b...

In Part 1 of this special series focused on our brain power and whether we are losing our minds, we addressed the slide we are reported to be experiencing in terms of attention span and critical thinking capacity.   Now In Part 2 we ask what we can do now to address slide. We are joined again by Carolina Pacheco-Punceles. She is a Behavioral Economist, AI Survival Kit Creator, Executive Function S...

Kristen Van Gelder is Partner and Co-CIO at Evanston Capital Mangement, where she has spent her entire career since college.    We begin our conversation with the roots of Kristen’s career, which corresponds quite closely with the roots and growth of Evanston Capital Management from the Northwestern University Endowment Management Team. Her career has spanned a significant period in the evolution...

Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?    Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete...

Artemiza Woodgate is Founding Partner at Integrated Quantitative Investments LLC, based in Seattle.  She has spent most of her career in the quantitative investment arena, including close to 5 years with Numeric, Man Group, and over 11 years with Russell Investments.   Our conversation opens with the 3Ms that Artemiza says define her – she is a mother, a mathematician and a lover of mountains. We...

Henry Song is a portfolio manager for Diamond Hill, a asset manager headquartered in Columbus Ohio with approximately $30 bn in AUM. He joined the firm in 2016. Prior to joining Diamond Hill, Henry was a portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan Asset Management from 2005 to 2016.  He specializes in securitized credit.   Our conversation races Henry’s somewhat unorthodox background and path into running mo...

Jo Kempton is Head of Lincolnshire Pension Fund, where she has spent most of her career in various roles, including as the manager of an internal UK equity portfolio. She is an active participant on the local government pension scheme circuit.    Our conversation starts with Jo’s early career and how she ended up pursuing a role in pensions. We speak about her work on the stock picking side, and d...

Stuart Dunbar is a Partner at Baillie Gifford, based in Edinburgh, where he has worked since 2003. He previously held a range of institutional marketing roles, but before that there were some unexpected interests and pursuits. We start there, with his move to Hong Kong and some of the cultural differences that he perceived when working overseas more broadly, much of them to do with self-confidence...

Jen Choi is CEO of ILPA – the Institutional Limited Partners Association, where she has spent over a decade. She previously spent over 7 years at the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association. Our conversation traces her background and her path to representing LPs and their interests in the fast-pace private asset arena. Our conversation has a strong emphasis on transparency – we open with a quo...

We are delighted to release as a bonus episode this conversation with long-time industry member, mentor and advocate Jennifer Strickland.  Over the course of Jennifer’s career she has held a series of roles starting out in the annuity space, moving into private wealth, hedge fund business development, alternative asset business development and most recently was Head of Business Development for Pre...

Krishna Mohanraj is International Portfolio Manager at Diamond Hill Capital Management, a $30bn asset manager headquartered in Columbus Ohio. Prior to joining Diamond Hill, Krishna spent time at Sanford C. Bernstein and Exelon corporation and prior to that was a product manager and solution architect.    We start by discussing Krishna’s background, starting in South India, how he moved to studying...

Debby Blakey is CEO of Hesta a $91 bn AUD Australian superannuation fund dedicated to the health and community services sector. She is also President of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and a director of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN).  Our conversation traces Debby's personal and career journey from South Africa, where she did consulting work, to build a n...

We are delighted to bring you Series 3 of our 2025 series, which we again are launching amid significant volatility in markets. However, as you will hear, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We start this series down under, hearing from Debby Blakey, CEO of Hesta, who describes what it means to be a “Super with Impact”, and a gutsy advocate for a fair and healthy community.    We...