#50. Eighth Public Investors Conference (Friday, October 28, 2022)

What was your best day…of things going a lot better the second time?

For one thing, this went a lot better than the Seventh Public Investors Conference. Ironically, as this one took place at home in Ottawa, and that one in Rome.

Of course, the Seventh in 2018 also came with some detracting factors, like: I wasn’t organizing it and was just awkwardly tagging along with the researchers at my institution, me getting robbed near the Coliseum a few days later followed a pub crawl where the guides ditched us halfway through¹, and me having to spend three hours in customs and thus barely missing my flight home.²

So when the hosting shifted to us for the next iteration³, even as the responsibilities shifted from the researchers to our foreign reserves group⁴, I did not hold much optimism.

The Public Investors Conference was a conference meant for policy makers who managed foreign reserves for their country (or an international organization). It was two days of sessions, each one centered around an important topic where three presenters would discuss a relevant paper they’d written followed by questions.

So my first main job, several months prior, was to read through each paper submission (with help from two researchers) and recommend the good ones to my director, for him and the three other co-organizers to decide on a final agenda.

My second main job was to write the thirty-minute opening remarks for one of the high-ranking officials at our institution. It was quite an extensive process: gathering all the content, figuring out a high-level message that was actually meaningful (and not generic fluff), and going through multiple drafts to get it to a high quality. But we ultimately ended up with something that I, my director, and the speechwriting specialist in our communications department were very proud of.

So the first conference day comes. The official makes the speech, it’s well-received by the fifty or so attendees⁵, and everything from that point on seems to go right:

Unlike last time, I’m one of the more active participants in the discussions. I had spent some extra time beforehand identifying meaningful, non-generic questions to ask for each paper. And my input is well-received, which, coming from international colleagues (most of whom are in more senior positions than me), means a lot.
Most notably, I struck a nice rapport with a quant from the hedge fund Janus Henderson, who presented a fascinating paper he’d written with the famous Myron Scholes⁶ (who consulted there) on the tails of statistical distributions. For him, I had a particularly insightful question on summary statistics prepared.⁷
I also have really good conversations with a lot of the public investors outside the sessions, facilitated by me doubling as the “guide” escorting people everywhere in the (fancy) National Arts Centre and our own building for dinner the two nights. One subtle difference I notice from 2018 is that I seem to be treated with much more regard as an expert in the field – a product of both my greater experience and the fact that it’s my team that’s hosting.
After the dinner on the second day, Neerad (#115) and I go with a dozen or so colleagues from the World Bank and BIS to some high-end lounge to keep having drinks and chatting – about both reserves and non-reserves related topics – late into the night.⁸
And of course, there’s the fact that this conference is even taking place in person after the last two years. Which is the most amazing part of all.

Despite all my reservations going in, this version of the Public Investors Conference was one to remember – for positive reasons this time. And good sign of things to come for me work-wise… (#74)

And half our contingent was drunk Austrians who got kicked out of the second bar.
Well, technically I missed it. But so did two other people. So they re-opened the doors (which apparently costs the airline a large amount of money) and let us in, delaying departure by an hour and a half. Then, half an hour before landing, this old Italian man sitting in front of me has some kind of medical issue, gets taken away, and I don’t see him again.
It cycled between us, the Bank of Italy, the World Bank in D.C., and the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland.
And the whole thing got delayed two years because we wanted to have it in person.
A considerably smaller number than back in 2018, for obvious reasons.
Of Black-Scholes model fame, in finance.
Shades of #102, but over two full days.
Safe to say, a lot of the positive things I’ve already repeated on these kinds of events (too many to count) also apply here…