Since 2010, the Student Managed Investment Fund has helped launch graduates’ careers in the financial world.

Researching companies in diverse sectors. Analyzing stock market data to understand trends. Deciding how best to invest more than $2 million of someone else’s money. This type of work happens daily at investment firms across the country. It also happens at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business.

Through the Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF), a two-semester course run by James Russell Kelly, students manage $2 million of the University’s endowment in a portfolio of stocks, bonds, and alternative assets.

Students start as analysts and are paired with second-semester students who work as portfolio managers. The analysts monitor sectors such as health care, energy, and real estate, while portfolio managers help make investment decisions and can take on additional roles, such as chief investment officer or quantitative analyst.

The fund started in 2010 with $1 million and has grown to more than $2.1 million, said Kelly, a senior lecturer in finance who also leads Fordham’s Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis.

“The primary theme is student empowerment—students make all the investment decisions,” he said. “My role is to set the parameters to give guidance, guardrails.”

At the first-ever networking event for SMIF, held on February 6 in the 12th-Floor Lounge at the Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus, current students connected with alumni who shared how their experiences helped them in their careers in the finance and investing worlds. Attendees also shared their SMIF stories with Fordham Magazine.

Rohit Roy, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Portfolio Manager, Health Care
Major: Finance with a Minor in Computer Science

“It’s active learning—you’re not learning from a textbook, you’re not learning theory. You’re looking at active real-world events and how they’re affecting the markets.

“Full time, I’m going to be working in trading [for Apex Capital after graduation]. So it’s a very, very direct kind of jump—you don’t really trade here, it’s more of a long-term investment mandate kind of thing. But a lot of the skills are obviously transferable. Like, you have to follow the markets closely, you have to understand how things work, be able to digest high-level information very quickly and act upon it. A lot of the skills link up quite nicely.”

Rishika Pal, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Former Managing Director
Major: Finance with a Minor in Computer Science

“I learned about [SMIF] my freshman year and I was like, what a wonderful opportunity, given the fact that not many schools trust their students with a section of their endowment. Being able to actively manage it and gain mentorship was so important to me. It was a really great experience—I ended up becoming managing director for the fund, so that was a very full circle moment.

“It’s one thing to learn about [investing] in theory, but when you’re looking at it from a holistic portfolio perspective—what data is accessible to us? What should be our benchmarks? How do we forecast and manage our allocation and risk? That type of hands-on learning, I think, is very different and unique.”

Ria Naidu, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Portfolio Manager, Information Technology
Major: Global Business with Concentrations in Finance and Economics

“I started looking into [the SMIF experience] my junior year, when I was figuring out my path. I thought it was a good opportunity to be able to [invest] money in an educational environment where there’s slightly more room for error than when you start in the real world. Whatever [work I’ll do as an equity research associate at Jefferies] will be pretty similar to what I’m doing now. So I think that’s been very helpful to get a glimpse of it, and actually be hands on and work with it, but also learn from Professor Kelly.”

Adam Arias, Class of 2025
SMIF Role: Analyst, Health Care
Major: Finance

“It’s kind of opening my eyes a little bit. It’s a very collaborative place. In SMIF, I can already tell your voice matters more. Your ideas are encouraged to come out.

“I’m going to be working in more of a client-facing role [in my internship at PIMCO this summer]. But [through SMIF] I’m getting experience in how to work in a team, where you kind of have an equal say, and then also just developing communication skills with everyone, being able to know what’s happening in the market and convey that to your manager. In my future role, hopefully I’ll be able to convey that to clients.”

Stephen Hearn, GABELLI ’15
Vice President, Public Finance & Infrastructure Direct Lending, J.P. Morgan

“I work in the bank’s public finance infrastructure portfolio, so [we’re] kind of taking all the management risk, very similar to what SMIF did. In SMIF, I learned the proper way to analyze risk, risk-reward, which is something I kind of carried into my job.

“[The SMIF experience is] something on your resume that most other kids from other schools won’t have, even if they’ve gone to an Ivy or something like that. You may not actually have practical investing experience unless you’ve done a program like this.”

Yaakov Musheyev, GABELLI ’20
High Yield Credit Research at J.P. Morgan

“I work in credit research, looking at industry trends, company-specific trends—and covering a sector in SMIF, I feel, was pretty similar: looking at headlines, looking at news for the sector we covered, building a model for one of the things we were trying to pitch, and then doing the whole presentation. So, building out the investment thesis and presenting it.”

Brigida Caruso, Class of 2024
SMIF Role: Co-Managing Director
Major: Global Business with Concentrations in Finance and Economics

“The hands-on research that we’re able to do—it’s more independently driven, so if you have an idea that you want to run with, you’re allowed to do that. And our class is done in the trading room at Rose Hill, so a lot of Bloomberg terminals are accessible there.”

Tyler Hoffman, Class of 2025
SMIF Role: Analyst, Industrials
Major: Finance

“I’m sort of working under someone who I learn from—[that’s] not to say that the professor doesn’t teach, but he’s there more to moderate and kind of give structure to things.

“I’ll be [interning] in banking this summer. A lot of it is just analyzing companies, and when you’re in a position of investing and having your money at stake, like Fordham’s money here, it kind of ups the ante in terms of how much work you put into looking at things. I think being able to transfer that to a banking context is really important.”

In his latest book, Make Today Matter (Loyola Press, 2018), best-selling author Chris Lowney, FCRH ’81, GSAS ’81, identifies 10 habits to help readers cultivate greater self-awareness, stick to their ideals, and learn to recognize the “inner demons” that threaten to derail them from a happier, more effective life. He reminds readers that, although life is filled with uncertainty, we ultimately control “what matters most: how [we] behave, react to life’s vicissitudes, and treat others along the way.”

In short chapters with titles like “Change Your Little Part of the World” and “Be More Grateful,” he shares stories of teachers, nurses, executives, and others who model these habits. With self-deprecating wit, he also shares stories from his own experiences.

For the past five years, Lowney has served as chair of the board of Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States. But he has had a multifaceted career, one that has included several major transitions he did not foresee.

“As an eighteen-year-old,” he writes, “I imagined that my high-beam headlights were illuminating a straight path through life and all the way to my deathbed: I entered a novitiate that year, fully expecting to end my days as a Jesuit priest. Then life happened. I discerned that my calling in the world lay outside the Jesuits.” He left the order in the 1980s, after earning degrees in medieval history and philosophy at Fordham, and went on to become a managing director at J.P. Morgan & Co., leading groups in New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and London.

In 2003, not long after leaving J.P. Morgan, he published his first book: Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World. In it, he drew on his rich knowledge of Jesuit history and teachings, as well as nearly two decades of experience in international banking, to present St. Ignatius’ compañía, the Society of Jesus, as a model of business leadership for the 21st century.

For Lowney, the Jesuits have been successful for centuries partly because they offer a way of thinking about leadership that is fundamentally different than most popular models. Instead of taking a top-down approach, focusing solely on the insights of people in charge, Jesuit training is based on the premise that each person can tap into their leadership potential by continually cultivating greater self-awareness. Heroic Leadership became a bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.

Since then, Lowney has published five other books, including Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads (Loyola Press, 2013), and lectured in more than two-dozen countries on business ethics, decision-making, and other topics. In 2006, he established a nonprofit, Pilgrimage for Our Children’s Future, to support various education and healthcare initiatives throughout the world.

He has also been an adjunct professor at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, where for the past two years he co-taught a course on leadership for MBA and Executive MBA students, guiding them—literally—in the footsteps of St. Ignatius. Students in the course travel to Spain in early October and trek some of the same route walked by Ignatius 500 years ago. In the process, Lowney told Fordham News in 2016, he and the students learn “about perseverance, planning, coaching, empathy, setting goals that will carry us forward, and, above all, about being self-aware people with a deep sense of purpose.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I’m passionate about the idea of becoming a great person who uses my gifts well, and for purposes greater than self (a “man for others” to put it in Jesuit speak). But note that I say I’m passionate about the idea of being such a person. As for putting it into action, I’m still rather self-absorbed, easily derailed, and not-quite-courageous.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“The most successful people I know are good at Plan B,” said James Yorke, one of the mathematician-pioneers of chaos theory. I’ve found it a very liberating idea (though I admittedly spin it beyond his initial concept). Whether it’s writing books or creating strategic plans for entrepreneurial ventures I’ve been involved with, it won’t come out perfectly the first time. So what? Let’s try our best, learn from failures, course correct, make plan B better, and have some fun along the way. That way of thinking leapfrogs the analysis-paralyzed fear of failure that so often stalls individuals and organizations. The literary-minded might prefer Samuel Beckett’s rendering of the same idea: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

What’s your favorite place in New York City?
Hmm. How about 93rd Street and 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. That’s where I grew up. My apartment building, church, school, and playground all on one block; passels of kids, always up for stickball, skully, cannon sticks, manhunt, etc. Granted, that block would look pretty nondescript to a visitor. But I guess that’s part of the point? Ultimately, it’s the people that turn places into favorites, no? But if you want a spot with more pizzazz, how about Wave Hill in my adopted borough, the Bronx. Go there for Sunset Wednesdays in the summer! You’ll love it.

What book has had a lasting influence on you?
The Acts of the Apostles. The Catholic Church is suffering a profound crisis. Consider, for example, our inability to engage young people as one serious challenge among many: When are we going to confront our challenges frankly and tackle them with creativity and urgency? We 21st-century Catholics have to drink whatever Kool-Aid those first-century Christians were drinking in the Acts of the Apostles. (It was, of course, the Holy Spirit that they imbibed.) Granted, Acts is not exactly a Tom Clancy-style thriller, but it’s a thriller nonetheless: frontier spirit, internal squabbles, shipwreck, and cameo leadership roles from holy entrepreneurs like Lydia, Priscilla, and Phoebe the Deacon. (Notice anything about those names?)

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Technology (think app-laden smartphones) is turning life into a “look at me” production. I’m edified and humbled by unsung Fordham alums around my time who do great things daily without broadcasting their derring-do for social media oohs and aahs. I’m thinking of J, a lawyer who helps lead a great social services agency for the impoverished; and of M, who helps deliver healthcare services for prison-involved populations; and of M, M, and plenty more like them: self-sacrificing parents who have set great examples for their kids.