| We have worked on hedge fund matters related to investment strategies and performance, position and portfolio valuation, risk management, fund fees, subscriptions and redemptions, capital structure, insider trading, market manipulation, and Ponzi schemes. | We have analyzed financial instruments such as equities, bonds, money market securities, FX, commodities, derivatives, and exotic structured products. |
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Christian T. Lundblad
Richard “Dick” Levin Distinguished Professor of Finance,
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research,
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise,
Kenan-Flagler Business School,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Christian Lundblad is an investments and finance expert focusing on asset pricing, investment management, and international finance. Professor Lundblad’s work addresses issues that are central to ERISA excessive fee, securities, and other investment-related matters. He has served as an expert in matters involving various investment issues, including ERISA cases alleging excessive fees and inappropriate investments.
In his research, Professor Lundblad addresses issues in empirical asset pricing, investment management, international finance, and the effect of the risk-return trade-off on capital markets. His recent work centers on hedge funds and hedge fund performance benchmarking. Professor Lundblad has also analyzed term structure dynamics, asset fire sales, and market liberalization—research that intersects with corporate and municipal bond pricing.
He has written numerous articles in leading academic publications, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. Professor Lundblad’s research has also received coverage in the mainstream media, notably Bloomberg, Forbes, and Institutional Investor. He serves as associate editor at Financial Management and the Journal of Banking and Finance.
Professor Lundblad teaches courses on investments, global financial markets and management, and macroeconomics. He has received multiple honors for outstanding teaching, including the MBA for Executives award and the OneMBA Teaching Excellence award, as well as other recognitions for his research. He is the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. In addition, Professor Lundblad holds a courtesy appointment as a special-term professor at the People’s Bank of China School of Finance at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
Professor Lundblad has consulted on defined contribution plans, mutual fund analysis, emerging market risk benchmarking, and consumer credit ratings for Fortune 500 companies and branches of the armed services. He has collaborated with private firms on various issues related to hedge fund and risk benchmarking. Earlier in his career, Professor Lundblad served as financial economist to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Frederick G. Van Zijl
President, RVZ Strategic Advisors;
Former Managing Director, Fortress Investment Group;
Former Head of U.S. Leveraged Finance, Barclays Capital;
Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
Rick Van Zijl has more than thirty-five years of experience as a financial services professional. Mr. Van Zijl has held senior roles at leading global investment banks, where he led high-profile transactions. He also served as an investor at a major hedge fund. As an expert witness, he has addressed valuation, access to capital markets, solvency, and leveraged finance, among other issues. His industry experience includes financial institutions, industrials, media, quick service restaurants (QSR), retail, and telecommunications.
Mr. Van Zijl has arranged and invested in customized debt and equity structures to finance buyouts, growth, acquisitions, recapitalizations, and restructurings. He has underwritten scores of debt capital market transactions, and has been involved in all stages of debt issuance, including origination, structuring, and syndication. Mr. Van Zijl has deep experience with leveraged loans, high-yield bonds, bridge financing, and mezzanine and distressed debt. His experience includes leading the debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing for the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and working on such notable restructuring transactions as Xerox and Solectron.
As president of RVZ Strategic Advisors, Mr. Van Zijl consults on topics related to private equity and credit financings in the insurance, lease finance, and asset management industries. Previously, as a managing director at Fortress Investment Group, he evaluated and underwrote investment opportunities in distressed assets, in the specialty finance, media, and infrastructure industries.
Mr. Van Zijl founded and headed the leveraged finance business at Barclays Capital, where he oversaw all noninvestment-grade credit origination and private equity and credit investing in the United States. In that role, he also chaired the firm’s Americas Credit Committee and served on the Americas Investment Banking and Global Investment Committees. Before joining Barclays, Mr. Van Zijl was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, with responsibility for all due diligence, structuring, underwriting, and approval processes for subject transactions in the leveraged finance group.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Todd T. Milbourn
Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance,
Olin Business School,
Washington University in St. Louis
Todd Milbourn is an expert on valuation, corporate finance, and corporate governance, notably executive compensation and its impact on company stock price, corporate risk-taking, and firm performance. Professor Milbourn has been retained as an expert by private firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, and by individuals in cases related to fair rates of return, breach of contract damages, lost earnings, investment programs, and managerial/executive compensation, including employee stock option programs.
Professor Milbourn has addressed issues related to credit ratings and bank megamergers. He is a coauthor of the executive-level book, The Value Sphere: Secrets of Creating and Retaining Shareholder Wealth, and has published articles in leading scholarly journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, and RAND Journal of Economics.
At Washington University in St. Louis, Professor Milbourn has taught finance-related courses for nearly two decades. An award-winning educator, he has been recognized numerous times for teaching excellence, and his faculty research has twice been honored with the Olin Award: Research That Transforms Business.
Professor Milbourn has experience as a board member of multiple hedge funds and is the current Audit Committee Chair of a hedge fund. He has experience as a board member on multiple special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), including serving as chair of the Audit Committee. Professor Milbourn also speaks extensively at professional and scholarly conferences in Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and across the United States.
Before joining the faculty of Olin Business School, Professor Milbourn taught at the University of Chicago and London Business School.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Jules H. van Binsbergen
The Nippon Life Professor in Finance,
Professor of Finance,
The Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania
Jules van Binsbergen is a corporate finance expert who specializes in issues related to asset pricing, institutional investors, and investments. Professor van Binsbergen analyzes a range of topics arising in mutual funds and pension plans, as well as asset allocation; risk evaluation; capital structure; dividend pricing; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing; and determinants of the cost of debt.
In his recent research, Professor van Binsbergen measured the organization, skill, and performance of asset managers in the mutual fund industry. He has published several articles measuring the skill of active managers and appropriate benchmarks for performance comparison. He has collaborated on machine learning models that construct a statistically optimal benchmark for firms’ earnings forecasts. In addition, Professor van Binsbergen has analyzed the effectiveness of monetary policy, discount rates, and stock return predictability.
Professor van Binsbergen has published award-winning articles in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance. He has coauthored book chapters on asset pricing and liability, the impact of regulations on pension plans, and decision-making in investment management.
Professor van Binsbergen is an associate editor at the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics. He is a former editor of the Review of Finance. He also serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a research fellow at the U.K.’s Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
For more than a decade, Professor van Binsbergen has taught courses in corporate finance, econometrics, and financial markets. He has received multiple teaching honors, including successive recognitions for excellence and rigor in teaching the Wharton School’s M.B.A. core curriculum.
Before joining the Wharton School, Professor van Binsbergen served on the faculty at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and taught at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Hedge Fund Capabilities
- Comparing actual investment approaches with what had been stated to investors
- Assessing fund performance relative to benchmarks and peers
- Understanding how investment practices adapted to changing market conditions
- Analyzing market developments that affected the value of investments by assessing causes, foreseeability, and market context such as liquidity
- Evaluating the relative performance and similarity of trading strategies across different funds advised by the same manager
- Conducting valuation of illiquid and bespoke instruments, including complex derivatives
- Reviewing contemporaneous valuations by fund manager
- Assessing the mark-to-market of positions, and relating changes in value to market factors
- Comparing actual risk management activities to the approaches stated to investors and to contemporaneous industry practice
- Assessing the effectiveness of risk management efforts, including alleged risk management failures, liquidations, impact of margin calls, gate provisions, and other external events
- Understanding the procedures used and the information considered in risk management, including determining whether available information was appropriately considered
- Evaluating the nature of the risks taken by the funds, including assessing the ex-ante probability of an adverse price movement
- Examining the evolution of risk management practices in response to market developments
- Estimating portfolio exposure to market price movements
- Assessing fee structures, such as performance incentives for managers and pricing structures for investors
- Analyzing investment inflows and outflows (subscriptions and redemptions) and the sensitivity of those flows to portfolio performance, market factors, and fund fee structures
- Modeling fund investment flows as a function of performance, size, investment strategy, age, and other variables
- Assessing capital structure and the use of leverage
- Evaluating allegations of misconduct, including insider trading and market manipulation
- Using sophisticated data analysis and algorithms to review large amounts of information to identify trends, anomalies, and potentially inappropriate transactions
- Analyzing internal fund documents, including marketing material, investor communications, investment guidelines, investment memoranda, performance analyses, and partnership agreements
- Evaluating produced documents, including traders’ chats, emails, and audio recordings
- Analyzing internal hedge fund position data covering multiple years and spanning multiple trading desks
Featured Cases
Selected Professionals
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