Understanding whether your investment outcomes are attributable to luck or skill is extremely difficult to disentangle which makes it virtually impossible to identify a skilled investor before they become skillful. Lots of research has been done on this topic and I am very excited to have the author of those published academic papers with us today.

Dr. Alan Crane is a Professor of Finance at Rice University’s Jones School of Business. He has degrees in economics, finance, and accounting and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the interaction between institutional investors and corporations with an emphasis on those investors’ performance and the impact they have on corporate financial policies.  In particular, he studies the performance of mutual funds and hedge funds and examines how ownership by these and other financial institutions interacts with firm governance.   He has published academic articles in the top finance journals such as Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science.  He is a two-time winner of the Jones School’s Award for Excellence in Research.  Alan has presented research at a number of major universities and conferences in both the U.S. and internationally, and his research has appeared in the popular press in such places as CNBC and Bloomberg.