Professor Fernando Diz

I am The M.J. Whitman Professor of Finance at the M.J. Whitman School of Management. I am also the Managing Director of The Orange Value Fund, LLC and the director of the Ballentine Investment Institute. Together with Martin J. Whitman, we created the Distress Investing seminar back in 2002 and as a result of our teaching, we  co-wrote the book: “Distress Investing: Principles and Technique”, Wiley 2009. This is the book that we shall use in the course. We also co-wrote: “Modern Security Analysis: Understanding Wall Street Fundamentals”, by Wiley Finance.

I served as a special consultant to the consultants to UBS Securities (2004-2009) and Bear Stearns (2004) under the Elliot Spitzer’s Global Settlement with Investment Banks in 2003. I teach courses in Value, Control, and Distress Investing. In 2006, I developed and started the two year Orange Value Fund program which recruits and trains the brightest Whitman students for careers in Investment Management. For info on the Orange Value Fund program see:

https://www.orangevaluefund.com

I have been taught by Mr. Whitman for the last twenty five years. I credit him for educating me in the craft of Fundamental Finance, which includes Value, Control, and Distress Investing, Credit Analysis and Venture Capital. I have come to realize that traditional academic finance has hijacked the way we think about finance in general, and investing in particular. This course and its cohorts: Value Investing (Fall semester) and Distress Investing (Maymester in New York City) are aimed at tackling investment problems by gaining a deeper understanding of wealth creation by businesses and how such wealth may or may not be reflected in security prices, why, and how to use securities to extract value. It is, at its core, a multidisciplinary course, meant to understand businesses and the securities they issue. It puts emphasis on understanding accounting, securities laws, corporate law, and the communities and conflicts of interests between all participants.   

Not that it matters too much (since I was re-educated by Martin Whitman), I got my MSc and PhD degrees from Cornell in 1986 and 1989 respectively.