Events

Doug is the Chief Investment Officer of The Leuthold Group, LLC, and Co-Portfolio Manager of the Leuthold Core Investment Fund and the Leuthold Global Fund.

In addition to his CIO and Portfolio Management responsibilities heading both the asset allocation and investment strategy committees, Doug maintains the firm’s proprietary Major Trend Index, a multi-factor model which evaluates the underlying health of the markets, both domestically and globally. He is also the lead writer for The Leuthold Group’s highly regarded institutional research publications.

Doug is an accomplished speaker and has presented at a range of engagements, including the Morningstar Investment Conference, CFA societies across the U.S., Minnesota CPA Society, Minneapolis Business Bank, and a variety of Advisor and private client events throughout the country. These appearances have encompassed a variety of settings, from intimate meetings to groups of around 300 attendees. Additionally, Doug is frequently used as a resource by the financial press, including appearances on CNBC and Bloomberg TV; he has been quoted several times in Barron’s and is often referred to by the leading trade journals for a variety of topics. He is a member of the Charles Dow Award committee, and the Market Technicians Association.

Before joining the Leuthold team, Doug was Chief Investment Officer of Treis Capital in Des Moines, Iowa, where he managed equity portfolios and published a quantitative equity research product. Prior to that, he worked at Principal Global Investors. Doug is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business Administration. He also played four years of varsity basketball at Coe, earning Academic All-America honors in 1986-87. Doug received an MA degree in Economics from The Ohio State University in 1990; he earned his CFA designation in 1996 and became a Chartered Market Technician in 2003.

Dr. Mark Shore, Director and Economist, CME Group, is responsible for generating economic analysis on global financial markets by identifying emerging trends, evaluating economic factors, and forecasting their potential impact on CME Group’s various asset classes. He is a well-known alternative investment expert with over 30 years of experience in capital markets. He is also an adjunct professor at DePaul University.

Previous positions include full-time finance faculty and executive director of the Arditti Center for Risk Management at DePaul University, director of Coquest Institute at Coquest Advisors, head of risk at Octane Research ($1.1 billion AUM), and chief operating officer of VK Capital ($300 million AUM), a wholly owned Morgan Stanley commodity trading advisor (CTA) business unit. He conducts educational workshops, webinars, and is frequently invited to speak at industry and academic conferences. Mark has contributed research to several global organizations on volatility, macroeconomics, commodities, asset allocation, due diligence, and alternative
investments.

Mark contributed chapters to the following Wiley & Sons books: Hedge Funds: Insights in Performance Measurement, Risk Analysis, and Portfolio Allocation (2005) and The Handbook of Commodity Investing (2008). He also wrote the introduction to the Vault Career Guide to Hedge Funds (2023), now in its fifth edition. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Commodity Insights Digest (CID) at Bayes Business School—City University of London, UK. 

Mark received his Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from DePaul University with his dissertation topic related to alternative investments. He received his MBA from the University of Chicago.

Mark Skousen (Ph. D., economics, George Washington University) was recently named one of the top 20 living economists in the world (www.superscholar.org).  In 2014, he was appointed a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in California.

He has the unique distinction of having worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE), and several for-profit companies.  In 2004-05, he taught economics and finance at Columbia Business School and Columbia University.  He has also taught economics, finance and business at Barnard, Mercy and Rollins colleges, and Chapman University.

Since 1980, Skousen has been editor in chief of Forecasts & Strategies, a popular award-winning investment newsletter (www.markskousen.com).  He was analyst for the CIA, a columnist to Forbes magazine, chairman of Investment U, and past president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in New York.  He is the editor of his own website, www.mskousen.com, and is the producer of FreedomFest, “the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” which meets every July in Las Vegas (www.freedomfest.com).

He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the Christian Science Monitor, and has made regular appearances on CNBC’s Kudlow & Co., Fox News, and C-SPAN Book TV.

His economics works include The Structure of Production (NYU Press), The Big Three in Economics (ME Sharpe), Economic Logic (Capital Press), and EconoPower (Wiley & Sons).  His investment books include Investing in One Lesson (Capital Press), and The Maxims of Wall Street (Eagle Publishing).  In 2006, he compiled and edited The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin (Regnery).  His latest book is A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street:  Austrian Economics for Investors (LFB Publishers).

In honor of his work in economics, finance and management, Grantham University renamed its business school, “The Mark Skousen School of Business.”

Based on his work The Structure of Production (NYU Press, 1990), the federal government has begun publishing a broader, more accurate measure of the economy, Gross Ouput (GO), every quarter along with GDP.  Skousen wrote the lead editorial on GO in the April 23, 2014 issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Read it here:  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579483870616640230

Known as the “maverick” of economics for his contrarian and optimistic views, his sometimes-outrageous statements and predictions, Mark Skousen is known and respected for his unique sense of market and investment trends in the financial world. With a Ph.D. in economics and a focus on the principles of free-market capitalism and “Austrian” economics, Mark Skousen has often gone contrary to the crowd in his investment choices and economic predictions — and has often been proved right.

His more unusual predictions include:

• Forecasting in the early 1980s that “Reaganomics will work!”
• Sending a special alert to subscribers of Forecasts & Strategies to “Sell all stocks and mutual funds” on Sept. 8, 1987, just six weeks before the 1987 Stock Market Crash
• Calling for the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism
• Predicting of the biggest bull market on Wall Street in the 20th century — the 1990s
• In his April, 2003, issue, Skousen gave a strong “buy signal” on the stock market, very close to the bottom of the market. At this time, he also introduced the Anti-Terrorist Portfolio, which has been remarkably profitable so far
• In the height of the 2009 economic woes, he predicted the Dow would hit 10,000 by the end of 2009, and was right!

Mark Skousen has built a reputation for not only accurately identifying the right economic and political trends, but also the right investments for the times.

An almost idealistic proponent of liberty and political freedom, Mark Skousen is actively involved in some of the most prestigious free-market and liberty think tanks in the world. He frequently speaks and writes articles for organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Libertarian Party, the Council for National Policy and the Mt. Pelerin Society. He is also the producer of FreedomFest, an annual conference held in Las Vegas (the country’s most libertarian city!) and billed as the world’s largest gathering of free minds on liberty. You can visit www.freedomfest.com for more information.

He is a member of American Economics Association (AEA) and the Mont Pelerin Society, and appears frequently at investment, financial and economic conferences around the world as a speaker.