Quarterly Investment Strategy Roundtable - Geopolitics: Prepare or predict?
Wednesday 23 September 2026 | 18:00 - 20:30 | Evening Event
Join CFA UK’s Investment Strategy Roundtable, a new quarterly flagship series to bring together senior investment professionals for high‑quality, discussion-led conversations on multi-asset investment strategy. To support open peer level conversation, this roundtable is designed for CFA Charterholders and ASIPs only, with attendee details reviewed in advance.
Hosted under Chatham House rules and led by a volunteer practitioner Co‑Chair, this in person roundtable provides a trusted forum for experienced investors to exchange views on today’s most pressing market themes. Discussions will span equities, fixed income, and alternative asset classes, with a strong focus on asset allocation, macroeconomic developments, and evolving market dynamics.
This quarter’s discussion will focus on Geopolitics: prepare or predict? Investors spend a great deal of time discussing geopolitical and political risk, but how much of it really matters for markets, and how much is simply noise? The roundtable will explore how geopolitics should be handled in the investment process, which assets are most exposed, and what, if anything can provide a useful hedge. With the U.S. midterms approaching and a new UK government setting out its policy agenda, the discussion will also consider how investors should deal with political event risk in practice.
Why attend?
- Gain insights into how senior practitioners approach strategic and tactical asset allocation
- Deepen your understanding of current macro themes and their impact across asset classes
- Hear diverse perspectives and real-world considerations shaping investment decision-making
Who should attend?
This event is designed for CFA Charterholder, ASIPs, portfolio managers, senior analysts, fund allocators, and other CFA Chartherholder investment professionals.
Speakers:
Ji Young, Senior Portfolio Manager, Amundi
Ji Young joined Amundi in March 2021 as a Senior Portfolio Manager on the Asian Equity Focus Fund.
Prior to Amundi, Ji Young was at BlackRock where she was Head of Research on a global income and long horizon concentrated strategy and has worked at Pimco and Pioneer Investments before this as a portfolio manager/analyst on emerging markets funds.
Ji Young graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in International Relations and is a HBS alumni. She also has the CFA ESG certificate and certificate from University of Cambridge in sustainable finance.
Will McManners — Founder and Managing Partner, MD One Ventures
Will McManners is Founder and Managing Partner of MD One Ventures, Europe's first venture capital firm dedicated to defence and national security. A former UK Special Forces officer, he founded the firm in 2021 to back the early-stage deep tech pre-seed through Series A that underpins the sovereign capability of the UK, Europe and allied nations.
Investments include XTEND (autonomous drone systems), Valarian (zero-trust infrastructure for government), Greenjets (electric propulsion), SatVu (thermal imaging satellites) and Airfinity (biosecurity and disease forecasting).
He joined the business in 2014 from BNP Paribas Investment Partners where he worked as a senior strategist. He’s a graduate of both the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and is also a CFA Charterholder.
Outside of work, Chris mixes enthusiasm and incompetence for sport in approximately equal measure. He is the proud coach of his daughter’s football team, proving the maxim that “if you can, do. If you can’t, coach.”
Lars Kreckel (Co Chair)
Lars Kreckel is the founder and Head of Research at Sentiment Matters Ltd, an independent research firm bringing structure and insight to one of the most overlooked drivers of investing: sentiment and positioning.
Before founding Sentiment Matters, Lars spent more than 20 years in macro and equity strategy roles across both the sell-side and buy-side, including Commerzbank, ABN AMRO, Exane BNP Paribas and Legal & General Investment Management. During more than a decade in LGIM’s multi-asset team, he was responsible for equity views and investment decisions, and conducted research across equity regions, sectors, styles and themes.
Stefanie is a London-based senior equity analyst and global equities portfolio manager with over 25 years of experience across Bloomberg Intelligence, GIB Asset Management, Unigestion, Allianz Global Investors, J.P. Morgan Cazenove, Société Générale, ING Barings, Sanpaolo IMI and Oppenheimer.
Shilpa Kapur, CFA (Co Chair)
Shilpa is a Director at Ocean Wall, London's premier independent merchant bank, specialising in alternative assets and advisory across the capital structure. She has nearly 20 years of institutional markets experience from Deutsche Bank, where she held successive leadership roles across equity derivatives, multi-asset coverage, quantitative investment solutions, and technology-enabled execution solutions. As Deputy Global Head of Cross-Asset Quantitative Investment Solutions Distribution, she built and delivered bespoke portfolio solutions across asset managers, insurers, pension funds, sovereigns, and hedge funds spanning EMEA, the Americas, and the Middle East.
Most recently, she was part of the leadership team driving a management board-level cross-bank growth initiative spanning Deutsche Bank's investment and corporate bank.
Shilpa is a CFA Charterholder and holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from IIM Bangalore and a BA in Economics from St Xavier's College, University of Mumbai. She also serves on the Corporate Development Board of Dogs Trust.
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