Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

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Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

In recent years the field of finance has exploded with innovation. New products, services and techniques abound. The risks of inflation, the volatility of interest rates, the deregulation of financial intermediaries and the unbundling of financial services have combined to present investment managers with challenges and opportunities far greater than in the past. For trustees and managers of pension, trust, endowment, and similar funds, the task of meeting the challenges and exploiting the opportunities is much more difficult. These fiduciaries must measure their investment decisions against constrained interpretations of a legal standard–the prudent man rule–that have caused it to lag far behind changes in investment theory and the marketplace. Drawing on financial history, a major opinion survey of institutional investors, and comprehensive reviews of the law and of the lessons of modern portfolio theory for prudence, this book presents a powerful case that the prudent man rule as elaborated in legal treatises and much of the case law would virtually compel a fiduciary to act imprudently in terms of financial theory and marketplace reality. In proposing a modern paradigm of investment prudence, the book uses illustrations drawn from such traditionally suspect categories of investment fiduciaries as securities lending, real estate, venture capital, options and futures and repurchaser agreements. An unusual examination of the interaction of the worlds of law and finance, this work will be of interest to fiduciaries who are subject to some from of prudent man rule and all others, including judges, lawyers and investment managers, who are called upon to interpret and apply that legal standard. Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

More About the Author

Biography

I love history and historical research. I also enjoy exploring art museums, those repositories of history in the form of cultural artifacts. That’s how my latest novel, RETURN OF THE SHADE, began, in an exploration of an exhibition of ancient Persian art at the British Museum that was filled with mosaics and relics of the ancient Persian Empire. That’s where I discovered a mysterious queen named Parysatis.

Parysatis lived for about 60 years from around 444 to 384 BC, the peak of power for the Persian Empire.

OK, I know what you’re thinking: “Why bother? Why pluck this woman from the dustbin of ancient history? For goodness sakes, she wasn’t even a Greek!” Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

No, not Greek. She was the purist strain of Persian, a direct descendent of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty and of the Persian Empire–a dynasty that brought stability, prosperity and a flourishing civilization to what we now call the Middle East. At its greatest, the Persian Empire extended from the Indus River to North Africa, from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf, one million square miles in all.

The head and heart of this Empire was the so-called “land of two rivers”, the Euphrates and the Tigris, between which the cradle of civilization was rocked. The United States has for many years suffered from its ignorance of this land and its people. A side benefit of research for this book was to fill in some of my personal knowledge gap. Readers of my story will similarly benefit. But this was not my reason for creating the novel.

The Persian Empire had everything under the sun. Everything, that is, except a single historian to preserve for posterity its highs and lows. Herodotus, much later recognized as the father of history, was just making a name for himself at that time, and that name was Greek. As seen through his eyes, and those of other Greek historians, the Persians were weak and effeminate. Their empire became a barbaric and despotic foil against which the courage, discipline, democracy, and culture of the Greek civilization was set.

And so, it was not surprising that the British Museum, in searching for the best title for its stunning exhibition, mounted jointly with the National Museum of Iran in 2005, used “The Forgotten Empire”. Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

Diligently I searched for references to Parysatis in the marvelously efficient computer facility of the British Museum, which links all UK libraries. It yielded not one biography or novel. Bevis Longstreth – Modern Investment Management & the Prudent Man Rule

So, my heroine was the forgotten queen of a forgotten Empire.

At first I hoped, and then, gradually, became convinced that hers was an immensely interesting and important life that no one had bothered to write about. By working with the few facts about her that had been recorded by Greek historians such as Plutarch and Ctesias, it was possible–much as it would be to divine an entire puzzle from a few important pieces–to fill in the empty spaces with imagined accounts of Parysatis’ life: a life endowed with great power and the instinct to know how to use it; a life fraught with the drama of the Achaemenids, a royal line beset with patricides, fratricides and other wicked episodes so typical of the ruling classes at all points of the compass.

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