Jeff Hooke is Managing Director of FOCUS, LLC, a national investment bank serving the middle market, principally with respect to mergers and acquisitions. Previously, he was a Director of Emerging Markets Partnership, a $5 billion private equity fund; a principal investment officer of the World Bank Group; and an investment banker with Lehman Brothers and Schroder Wertheim, respectively, two prominent securities firms based in New York. He has closed over 100 corporate finance and private equity transactions.

He is the author of four authoritative books:  The Dinosaur Among Us: The World Bank and Its Path to Extinction,  The Emerging Markets, Security Analysis on Wall Street and M&A, A Practical Guide to Doing the Deal. 

Barron's called Security Analysis on Wall Street "a welcome successor to Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis." A portion of the book is required reading for the CFA exam, and the second edition was released in May, 2010. Mr. Hooke has spoken previously to the CFA societies of New York, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Istanbul, Moscow, Munich and Beijing.

Mr. Hooke holds a BS from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School. 

Private equity funds that focus on leveraged buyouts now manage about $500 billion in equity capital. With debt, their collective buying power is over $2 trillion, making the funds an important factor in finance and business. While industry hype and media reporting suggest otherwise, the fact remains that the average LBO fund does not beat S&P 500 returns for its clients.

Mr Hooke will discuss (i) recent studies on LBO fund returns; (ii) the perplexing continued popularity of LBO funds; and (iii) a computer program that mimics LBO fund attributes through public stock selections, and thus potentially reduces the need for institutional investors to pay high LBO fund fees.