WHAT AN EXCITING AND EVENTFUL CONFERENCE SEASON WE’VE HAD THESE PAST FEW MONTHS!

In March, we welcomed a panel of Canada’s top thought leaders to our 2016 Annual Spring Pension Conference. The speakers addressed trends and issues affecting the current environment and shared with us the tools required to develop better insights into managing today’s investment portfolios. At the end of each presentation, we were pleased to see the active table discussions taking place among fellow industry professionals. Moderators for this year’s pension conference were Betty Liu and Pamela Ritchie, who both did a wonderful job of ensuring seamless transitions between speakers while highlighting important points at the end of each presentation.

This April, we were thrilled to congratulate the global champions of this year’s CFA Institute Research Challenge, hosted in Chicago. This is the first time a Canadian team has brought home the global win. The student team from the University of Waterloo’s School of Accounting and Finance and its CFA Society Toronto mentors were tasked with analyzing a publicly traded company, producing a research report on their analysis with a buy, sell, or hold recommendation, then presenting and defending their analysis before a panel of industry professionals. Over two gruelling days, the team competed against 106 business schools from across the globe and finally came out on top on Day 2. (Read more on page 12.)

Throughout the conference season, the Society’s events and programming team worked around the clock to produce high-quality and engaging events. It brings me great pride to see our staff and volunteers’ commitment to enhancing your membership through the development of relevant and thought-provoking programs.

In May, CFA Society Toronto, along with Societies around the world, joined together to build awareness in support of Putting Investors First Month. There are 125,000 CFA charterholders globally, with 8,600 members here at CFA Society Toronto, making Toronto the largest Society of CFA charterholders in the world. Throughout May, we actively promoted the CFA designation and our charterholders through an interactive multi-channel campaign that incorporated out-of-home advertisements and, for the first time, leveraged digital advertisements and social media.

Finally, we also increased our efforts in bringing our membership greater value by developing a richer member services platform, including new partnerships for our Affinity Program, the upcoming implementation of our new CRM (customer relationship management) system, and our new website development project—all scheduled to be operational in the next few months. Stay tuned!