Afnan Khan

I supervise 8 analysts; design, test, & develop actionable research products and their delivery protocols; head Master portfolio construction; serve Sector Lead-Industrials, conduct thematic top-down research; present to clients & investment committee, and engage in business product development initiatives.

Achievements:
 Going against our low PE investing approach, aggressively pitched high PE growth stories while taking full responsibility for any backfire that directly added 6% alpha in 2014

 Developed proprietary petrochemical Quarterly-forecast product that generated 7% alpha 3Qs in a row in 2014

 Pitched bearish Urea & DAP fundamentals in 2012-13 adding 5% alpha (& 33% on those trades)

 Recommended large-to-small cement stock switching in 2013 & 2014 adding 7% sector alpha

 Conceptualized novel banking anchor-strategy and probability-driven-adjuster rules adding 3% alpha in the beta-testing phase

 Developed completely new ‘Charter of Investment Research’; introducing analyst evaluation criteria, smart communication protocols, and demand-driven 3-level outputs that cut down on average research days/deliverable by 22% in the first year of implementation

 Introduced better Research team structure with 3 Sector Leads: Industrials, Financials, & Retail; each functionally supervising 2 junior analysts that addressed our ‘knowledge continuity’ problem

 Introduced & implemented mandatory network folder structure to reduce operational risks & enhance auditable trail

 Pitched and got appointed team lead on shipping, & Frontier markets fund launch

Riyad Capital (RC) a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s third largest bank by assets−Riyad bank; it is a $6 billion plus AUM company. Owing to a strong chemistry, geology, & building materials background; I was handed over petrochemical, cement and building materials sectors to cover. Right off the bat, developing 15 comprehensive financial models, industry analysis, & global macro outlook; I recommended tilting off exposure from methanol, urea, TiO2, & downstream derivative players to pure-play Olefin crackers. Meeting clients, and supervising a team of eight, I have nudged my analysts to look deep into fair multiple for growth. Moreover, driven by interesting global shipping dynamics, and sitting with ship financiers, I am the team lead on looking into capturing value in vessel prices through CEF structure in 3-5 year tenor. I am also leading efforts to launch Asian & African population play-Frontier market equity fund in both conventional indexed and alternative modes. I conduct thematic cross-sector top-down research and head Master portfolio construction. My administrative role involves analyst evaluation, template development & standardization, & output deliverable design.

Alfalah GHP Investment Management Ltd. (AGHP) a joint venture of Pakistan’s fifth largest bank by assets−Bank Alfalah; Abu Dhabi group (of Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, UAE minister of Culture); and GHP Arbitrium Financial Services of Switzerland (a $3 billion alternative AUM house); it is a growing asset management company. Looking back 5 years with AGHP, through long working hours, I see my work unmatched by any other. In the first two years, I developed 35 detailed financial models of companies; ranging from small to large cap, and from banks, insurance, oil & gas, and chemicals to power, pharmaceuticals, and telecom. My work role evolved with time; as head of research I supervised a team of three; as a portfolio manager I managed two capital protected funds with combined size of PKR 1.8 billion; as strategist, I formulated company-wide expectations on interest rates, currency, & capital markets. On business product development side, I participated in pre-IPO marketing phase of our Capital protected fund launches, drafted asset class & WAM permissibility design portion of our Money Market fund, accomplished end-to-end concept design of a constant NAV fund, and pitched collaborative products that would capitalize on our parent bank & subsidiary insurance relationship.

CECOS University is the only Pakistan University in private sector offering engineering programs. Building on my teaching assistantship experience─ instructing undergraduate labs at University of Alberta, I introduced modern methods of delivering knowledge at CECOS University. For example I would teach at the actual construction site for the construction materials course, and would assign tasks to classify local nearby geological structures for the geology course. These methods proved effective and as a result, not only student attendance jumped up sharply but also pass rates improved significantly. Moreover, my students to this date keep in touch and write to me describing how wonderful learning experience they had.

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the largest global conservation network that is headquartered in Switzerland and a union of government and NGO member organizations. I felt honored to join IUCN as Earthquake Response Coordinator to implement post earthquake rehabilitation initiatives. Coordination activities got off the ground quickly, first by brainstorming ideas among IUCN’s thematic areas─ biodiversity, climate change, and sustainable energy, and then putting ideas to paper, developing proposals & pitching these to our donors, and finally implementing funded projects. I remember how inspiring it was to engage Himalayan communities, faced with extreme cold, and in the process discovering their culture, social constraints, and gender issues.

Forest Watershed and Riparian Disturbance (FORWARD): a research project partly funded by Millar Western Forest Products is spread across the Canadian Boreal forests which, like Amazon, are of global importance. Canada, the world’s largest forest product exporter, and third largest gas producer; is faced with intensification of harvesting practices. The center of industrial activities, Alberta’s forest landscape, is managed through a Forest Management Agreement (FMA) between a forest company and the Government. It provides the forest company with the right to grow, harvest and remove timber but requires it to assume full responsibility for the planning and sustainable management of forest resources. In order to cope with such expanded management role, and without tools or base data to develop operating field procedures, the need to monitor and model ecosystem dynamics had become indispensable. It was in this industrial context that the FORWARD project was conceived. Members of academia, and industry came together in 2001, to start monitoring 16 natural and disturbed watersheds to generate the long-term database necessary to simulate models that could be linked to forest management plans. In order to generate broad scale screening indicators, as surrogates of ecological health, my research initiative took a novel, innovative, and first of its kind approach. I employed U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite data to capture vegetation growth dynamics as watersheds were systematically test ‘disturbed’ (harvested, & put on fire). Vegetation metrics were developed and found sensitive to respond to prevailing stressors. The whole exercise was number intensive and involved special computing power, and sophisticated statistical and GIS software (SAS, MATLAB, ESRI ARCGIS, and ERDAS Imagine for example) to process multiple terabytes of imagery.