Mr. Chou is the President of the Toronto-based Chou Associates Management Inc. Mr. Chou, a CFA, ended his formal education at Grade 12. While working as a technician for a phone company in 1981, he started an investment club that would later become the Associates fund. Mr. Chou has operated two of the country’s most successful funds, Chou Associates Fund and Chou RRSP fund, for the last 20 years. In 2005, the Canadian Investment Award named him the fund manager of the decade. His approach is to “find bargains and maintain discipline; if you can not find bargains stay in cash”.

The  financial  media  have   extensively   covered  Francis’   style, performance and character over the years. The latest media articles on Francis can be read here and here.

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Mr. Bradley is the President and founder of Steadyhand Investment Funds Inc. His education includes a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Manitoba (1979) and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business (1983). Tom has 25 years of experience in the investment industry. He started his career in 1983 as an Equity Analyst at Richardson Greenshields. Tom spent eight years with the firm, the last three of which he served as Director, Institutional Sales. In 1991, he joined Phillips, Hager & North Investment Management Ltd., where he continued his career as a research analyst and took on additional responsibilities as an Institutional Portfolio Manager. In 1996, Tom was appointed to the Board of Directors of PH&N. In 1998 he took on the role of Chief Operating Officer, and shortly thereafter, in 1999, he was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer, a role that he held until he resigned from the firm in 2005. Tom writes a column every second Saturday in the Report on Business section of the Globe and Mail.

Seth A. Klarman, MBA, The Baupost Group, Boston, Massachusetts (March 17th, 2009)
– Videoconference.

Mr. Klarman is President of The Baupost Group, L.L.C. Founded in 1982, Baupost discretionarily manages $15 billion for a number of institutional and wealthy individual investors. Baupost uses a value discipline with an event-driven bias to find global opportunities in such diverse areas as publicly-traded and private equities, bankrupt and financially-distressed debt, and real estate. Seth has managed Baupost’s investments from inception. Baupost’s largest partnership vehicle has achieved net annual return to investors of just over 20% and has experienced only one money-losing year since it was formed in 1983. Seth is a 1982 MBA graduate of Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. He received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in Economics from Cornell University in 1979. In 1991, he wrote a now out of print book entitled ''Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor'', which sells for $1,200 on Amazon and $2,000 on eBay and has been stolen from most libraries. Seth is also a world-class worrier. In one letter, Mr. Klarman said, ''At Baupost, we are big fans of fear, and in investing, it is clearly better to be scared than sorry.'' In an earlier note, he wrote, ''Rather than ratchet up risk, our approach has been to hold cash in the absence of opportunity.'' Seth serves on several not-for-profit boards and lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.

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Ms. Shannon is the President & Chief Investment Officer of Sionna Investment Managers. She received her CFA in 1987 and her MBA in 1993 from the University of Toronto. Kim founded Sionna in the summer of 2002, and has 25 years of investment management experience.  Prior to founding Sionna, Kim was Chief Investment Officer and Senior Vice President at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, Canada. She is a past President of the Toronto CFA Society and is currently on the Boards of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, the Accounting Standards Oversight Committee and the CFA Institute's Financial Analysts Seminar.  In 2005, Kim was awarded the Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year Award.  Kim has also received the RBC Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Award and the WXN’s Canada’s Most Powerful Women Top 100 Award in 2007.

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