Faculty Feature with Professor James Ward | AUP to You

Join us for this Faculty Feature with Assistant Professor of International Business Administration James Ward where he will give his talk: "Historic Financial Market Draw-downs and Anomalies and Implications forCurrent Market Conditions  (or, Crazy Things That Should Not Have Happened But Did)." He will draw on his personal career spanning twenty years working in financial markets to provide a historical framework around the March 2020 market draw-downs and discuss historic market trends and crazy patterns in financial markets.

This event will take place on Zoom. Please contact alumniaup.edu for more information.

Please register here

About the Speaker

A Mississippi native, Professor Ward joined The American University of Paris in 2001. After a first degree in Philosophy at Boston University (1985), he continued at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München before working as a financial aid officer, then a commercial fisherman in Sitka, Alaska. He served as Youth Minister at Christ Church, Greenwich, then tested a vocation as a Benedictine monk. He afterward worked in futures markets at the Chicago Board of Trade focusing on trading and research. After a decade as an analyst, database manager, statistician, and economist, he completed a Master of Science in Finance at The George Washington University (1999). He founded Andres, McKenzie & Ward which was acquired by Alternative and Derivative Investments (ADI) of Paris, a hedge fund. He served as high yield bond investment manager for ADI, and began teaching at AUP to distract himself from market stress. Professor Ward joined AXA Investment Managers as head of High Yield Investments, then joined AUP full-time as Assistant Professor of Finance in 2013, and currently is completing his Doctoral thesis in Finance at L’Université Paris. Ward currently researches hedge funds, the persistence of excess returns, fixed income & credit markets, corporate capital structure, and exotic derivatives. He recently was Visiting Professor of Economics at Deep Springs College where he taught computational and behavioral finance.