Short Selling: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Monday November 22, 4 PM

Pedro Saffi joins us for a Policy@McCombs talk. This talk with cover how short selling works and how it can be used to reveal information about future stock prices, corporate governance, and mutual funds’ ability to outperform their benchmarks.

Prof. Pedro Saffi is a Professor of Financial Economics at CJBS and the Director of its Master of Finance program. He obtained his PhD in Finance from London Business School in 2007 and was an Assistant Professor of Finance at IESE in Spain between 2007 and 2011. Prior to that, a MSc. in Economics from Fundação Getulio Vargas (2002) and a BA in Economics from IBMEC Business School (1999), both in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Dr. Saffi has extensive teaching experience. It includes courses for MBA, EMBA, MPhil, MSc., PhD, and Executive Education students at the Cambridge Judge Business School, London School of Economics, London Business School, IESE Business School (Spain), Reykjavik University (Iceland), Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil), Myra Business School (India), SKKU (South Korea), and Nile University (Egypt). In 2012 and 2015, he was awarded an Outstanding Teaching Award by Cambridge Judge Business School.

His research focuses on topics such as security lending markets; short selling; and limits to arbitrage. He regularly presents his work in the top academic conferences and contributes with articles to the popular press. He has published his work in the top Finance journals in the world, like the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and the JFQA. In 2012, he was awarded one the Q Group’s research awards, in 2013 and 2018 awards by Inquire Europe, in 2015 the NAC & Blackrock Global Challenge for Innovation in Corporate Governance prize, and one of the 2015 Crowell prizes given by PanAgora Asset Management.

His professional experience includes working as a consultant to Mondrian Investment Partners, as a corporate valuation expert for the United Nation’s Permanent Court of Arbitration, for real estate companies, and for pharmaceutical companies. He also serves in the advisory board of a hedge fund that uses machine learning methods to trade cryptocurrencies.