arry Marmer, CFA, strives to have an impact on the growth of ideas in the marketplace while coaching others. “I thrive on building new ideas, implementing them in the marketplace, and working closely with clients,” Marmer says.

       Marmer is senior vice president of institutional investment services at Franklin Templeton Investments in Toronto. He regularly speaks on investment topics across North America and has written more than 40 articles, as well as a handbook on institutional investment management.
       With more than two decades of experience in the profession, he says the CFA designation is, “A necessary educational requirement needed to succeed in the global investment arena today—and yesterday—and tomorrow.”
       He explains, “I felt that this was something I had to do, in order to succeed and be recognized in the business.” Marmer says that the CFA charter is the application of the academic skills he learned in graduate school and that it demonstrates to his clients a certain level of expertise in the field that many in the business do not have.
       Marmer has been proactively building his investment expertise for a long time. As a young child he ran a small fund created with a pool of $2,000 invested by his father and a few friends of the family. He diversified the portfolio as he learned, and once he broke even, he closed the fund, happy with the education and experience he’d accumulated for himself.
       “That’s how I started off,” he says. “I always knew I wanted to go into investments.”
        As an undergraduate at what is today the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, he demonstrated a similar penchant for testing ideas himself, measuring concepts in the real world rather than just learning about them abstractly. He noticed an apparent inefficiency in the football betting market that he likened to speculative markets and promptly set about conducting research to test his theories. With a fresh set of data to support his theory, he proposed a paper for publication with the backing of two professors. The resulting paper, “The Efficiency of Certain Speculative Markets and Gambler Behavior,” subsequently was published in the December 1985 issue of the Journal of Economics and Business, a rare event for an undergraduate.
        When Marmer graduated with a bachelor’s of business administration in 1983, just after a recession, he had difficulty finding a job in investments. The first job he took as a mortgage broker ultimately wasn’t satisfying. Hoping to improve his chances at becoming an investment analyst, he decided to return to the Schulich School of Business to earn an MBA.

        Fresh out of graduate school and with a short stint researching options pricing efficiency at the university, Marmer ventured back into the business world. He landed a job at The Hudson’s Bay Company on the treasury side as a capital markets analyst, where he managed short-term debt risk. After some time there, however, he began to realize that to achieve his dream job, he was going to need more practical training. A year later, while working at Sun Life as a quantitative analyst, he looked into the CFA Program and determined that the charter was what he wanted. He enrolled and finished the program in three years, still reading and now writing articles that were based on issues that his clients faced.
       He published a paper on the duration of stocks, which attracted the interest of Mercer Investment Consulting. Mercer offered him a position as a consultant–this was the dream job he’d been seeking. Marmer describes it as “a great chance to help clients solve the practical issues involved in institutional investment management.”
        The job at Mercer provided him with ample ideas, and Marmer continued to publish. One of the papers that he wrote while at Mercer, “International Investing: A New Canadian Perspective,” won an award for best Canadian research by the Toronto Society of Financial Analysts (now the Toronto CFA Society) and was published in the prestigious Financial Analysts Journal in 1991. He has authored nearly 40 more articles, most of which were published in Canadian publications.
        Eventually Marmer’s prolific authorship led to speaking engagements, which he uses as another forum to test new ideas. In fact, once his ideas are crystallized in written form, he then turns them into presentations so he can gauge the response from other investors. “I enjoy discussing investment strategies and seeing how people react to these concepts,” he says.
        In terms of advice for people interested in a career in investments, he says that, at a minimum, they need to stay on top of what’s published in the Financial Analysts Journal. Those articles will help them understand what’s going on in the market so they can form their own opinions, he explains. And the next step for a successful investment professional is to evaluate those opinions, constantly refining what he or she believes. He advises that his colleagues regularly ask themselves: “What do you believe versus what do you see?” He continues, “The end game is helping your clients with informed views. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what really makes the market—people with views.”