It is now our annual custom to take time in the summer months to share insights on the ever-evolving fundamentals of finance and investing. Please join us for our 5th annual State Street Summer Sessions, where we feature back-to-basics presentations from our renowned academic partners and the deep expertise of our research team in State Street Markets.

Thursday, July 10, 11:00 am EST/3:00 pm UTC

Ronnie Sadka, Boston College, State Street Associates Academic Partner

Tuesday, July 15, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

Alberto Cavallo, Harvard Business School, State Street Associates Academic Partner

The recent trends indicate that the inflation crisis is ending. However, central banks and investors remain vigilant and cautious about the potential future trajectory, reflecting the persistent uncertainties in the economic landscape. In this session, Alberto Cavallo ꟷ the Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, co-founder of PriceStats, and member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ꟷ will discuss the fundamentals of how inflation is measured, what drives it, and how to think about the risk to investors in 2025

Thursday, July 17, 11:00 am EST/3:00 pm UTC

Robin Greenwood, Harvard Business School, State Street Associates Academic Partner

In an increasingly interconnected world, it is impossible to succeed as an investor without a firm grasp on economic fundamentals and policy levers. In this session, Robin Greenwood ꟷ the George Gund Professor of Finance ꟷ will review the fundamental tenets of central banking with a focus on the main questions global investors should be thinking about in 2025.

Tuesday, July 22, 9:00 am EST/1:00 pm UTC

Antoinette Schoar, MIT Sloan School of Management, State Street Associates Academic Partner

This presentation discusses the economics of staking markets, which shares many similarities with traditional financial industries such as index and money market funds. Using detailed blockchain data, we analyze the investment behavior of investors on staking platforms and document significant heterogeneity in investment behaviors across delegators. Second, we show how validators set their fees by considering delegator mobility and variations in scale economies. We will discuss the implications of the findings  for the design of staking markets in decentralized finance.

Thursday, July 24, 9:00 am EST/1:00 pm UTC

Huili Song and Andrew Li, State Street Markets Research and Insights

Replay Available

Tuesday, July 29, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

Marvin Loh, State Street Markets Research and Insights

With so many global macro themes to consider, investors are faced with a myriad of investment options as they try to optimize their views around trade, inflation, and growth. At the center of many of these views is the rates markets, which seem to equally offer an unlimited number of ways to facilitate a myriad thematic macro trades. We therefore need to understand the underlying drivers of yields In order to correctly assess the risks and opportunities afforded by the rates markets. We will analyze the main drivers impacting rates, dissecting inflation views, policy expectations and term premium in assessing their impact on the term structure of rates.

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Thursday, July 31, 11:00 am EST/3:00 pm UTC

Mark Kritzman, Founding Partner, State Street Associates, State Street Global Markets Founding Partner, CEO, Windham Capital Management, LLC, Chairman, Windham’s Investment Committee

Relevance-based prediction is a model-free approach to prediction that forms predictions as relevance-weighted averages of observed outcomes.  The relevance weights are composed of similarity and informativeness, which are both measured as Mahalanobis distances.  This prediction method deals with complexities that are beyond the reach of conventional prediction techniques such as linear regression analysis, and it does so in a way that is more transparent, more adaptive, and more theoretically justified than widely used machine learning algorithms.

Tuesday, August 5, 9:00 am EST/1:00 pm UTC

Dan Drezner, Professor of International Politics Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, State Street Associates Academic Partner

The past year has been a tumultuous one for geopolitics, with no end in sight.  Which geopolitical and geoeconomic stresses are likely to continue?  Which might subside? What are the possible second and third-order effects, and what are the long-term effects to be on the lookout for? 

Thursday, August 7, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

David Turkington and Megan Czasonis, State Street Markets Research and Insights

When investors seek returns in foreign markets, they inevitably gain exposure to currency risk. Efficiently managing this risk and turning it into an opportunity to enhance performance requires a well-defined currency process. In this presentation, Megan Czasonis (head of Portfolio Management Research at State Street Associates) and David Turkington (head of State Street Associates) will discuss how to approach currency hedging, first from the perspective of managing risk, and second from the perspective of generating active returns. In doing so, they’ll discuss how to balance the risk and diversification properties of foreign currencies, show how factors—both traditional and new—can explain currency moves, and identify which factors have worked well lately and which have broken down.

Tuesday, August 12, 11:00 am EST/3:00 pm UTC 

Alex Cheema-Fox, State Street Markets Research and Insights

Sophisticated investors have long recognized that market participants are not always 100 percent rational and that behavioral biases and trends can influence markets. It is essential that investors learn to recognize these patterns - both in themselves and the markets at large - as well as how to measure and account for them when managing portfolios. In this session, Alex Cheema-Fox Head of Investor Behavior Research at State Street Associates - reviewed key principles of behavioral finance with a practical focus on implications for investment management.

Thursday, August 14, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

Tim Graf, State Street Markets Research and Insights

This session aims to establish a basic understanding of FX Options terminology and outline some use cases using simple vanilla structures. We will also provide an overview on the pricing of options, explain the 5 Option Greeks, and illustrate practical examples of pricing requests and executions.

Tuesday, August 19, 11:00 am EST/3:00 pm UTC

Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School, State Street Associate Academic Partner

Throughout the end of 2024 and the first half of 2025, private equity faced enormous challenges, navigating lower capital inflow, slower exit activity, decreased valuations and higher capital costs. In this lecture, Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner will discuss the major factors to consider when investing in today's market conditions. Professor Lerner will provide insight into the drivers of the historic private equity (PE) boom, current trends that are impacting the direction of the market, and secular shifts that will influence the long-term outlook of PE. The content will draw from a combination of academic research, industry data, and expert insights to provide a 360-degree view of the market landscape. From this lecture, investors will gain a foundation for positioning themselves for success amidst present and future market dynamics.

Thursday, August 21, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

George Serafeim, Harvard Business School, State Street Associates Academic Partner

Discover how the world’s leading alternative asset managers are harnessing insurance balance-sheets to secure long-duration, low-cost capital and super-charge private-market deployment—reshaping earnings profiles, lowering funding costs, and creating a new hybrid model that blends steady spread income with high-growth fee streams. This session unpacks the strategic logic behind the recent wave of insurer acquisitions and reinsurance deals, quantifies their impact on ROE, valuation multiples, and risk metrics, and highlights what it all means for institutional portfolios seeking durable yield and downside protection in today’s uncertain rate environment.

Tuesday, August 26, 10:00 am EST/2:00 pm UTC

Gideon Ozik, MKT MediaStats, State Street Associates Academic Partner

Analysis of textual information pertaining to stocks, bonds, and currencies can provide investors with valuable insights into market trends and investor behaviors, as well as improve their ability to predict future fluctuations of asset prices. In this session, we will cover various textual analysis methodologies, review advancements in AI and Large Language Models (LLM), and demonstrate practical applications such as prediction of stock returns using LLMs applied to media coverage, short squeezes using social media, treasury yields using media coverage of monetary policy, and introduce analysis of local media to forecast election outcomes.