A Tribute to Dr. Edward Rosenbaum, CFA

I recently learned of the passing of a mentor and business partner I’d like the world to know more about – Dr. Ed Rosenbaum, CFA.

You’ve likely never heard of Ed – he was a quiet, unassuming man. A teacher, father, husband, businessman. What makes Ed a giant is that many of us in the investment management profession owe our careers, in part or in whole, to Ed. In my case, I wouldn’t be the CEO of Kaplan Professional if it wasn’t for Ed. Let me explain why.

The Birth of the Study Seminar for Financial Analysts (SSFA)

In 1963, the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts (ICFA) launched the CFA designation program to provide investment analysts and portfolio managers a way to signal technical competence, professionalism, and ethical character to the world. The ICFA would later join forces with members of the Financial Analysts Federation (FAF) to form the Association for Investment Management and Research (AIMR), which would later be rebranded to the CFA Institute we know today.[1]

Four years after the first CFA exams were administered, Ed launched a week-long, intensive review program for candidates studying for this very difficult test at Lehigh University where he was a professor and then moved the program to the University of Windsor after receiving a faculty position there[2]. After modest beginnings, word of candidate success after attending Ed’s program spread through the small, but growing CFA candidate community. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was no competition for Ed’s services, so if you wanted to ‘cram for the CFA,’[3] you had to travel to Windsor, Canada and the University of Windsor to do so.

In my recent article Teach, Coach, Mentor, and Inspire, I tell the story about how I became part of the CFA exam prep industry with the help of my teacher, friend, and mentor – Carl Schweser. What many people don’t know is that Carl got his start in the industry at SSFA with Ed in 1982. Soon after Carl formed the Schweser Study Program in 1990, he introduced me to Ed and I too was teaching at SSFA – making the trek to Windsor each year in early May to teach candidates from all over the world.

When Carl started teaching for Ed, there were, for all intents and purposes, three ways to study for the CFA exam. You could go to SSFA, attend a three-day review session with Bob Stalla and buy the Stalla Notes, or go it alone. The ‘go it alone’ strategy was (and is still) not recommended due to the breadth and depth of the curriculum.

Back in the 1980s and into the late-1990s, the CFA curriculum consisted of individual chapters from academic textbooks across a range of subjects from investments to economics to accounting. You literally purchased a stack of textbooks nearly two feet high and waded through them. There were no formal learning outcomes and correlating what was in your stack of texts to what would actually show up on the exam was daunting at best. Dutiful candidates would stare at the 600+ pages of the Economic Report of the President (also an assigned reading) and wonder what on earth would be tested. To keep your sanity, you needed someone who’d ‘been there, done that’ to convince you not to invest much time in the Economic Report of the President,[4] because most years, NOTHING from that volume appeared on the exam! Strategy was everything, and astute candidates knew it.

An Average Day at Windsor

The logical question is: why Windsor, Canada? It certainly seems like an odd destination for a CFA Review program, but the University of Windsor was where Ed taught finance for 25 years. Also, the timing of the Canadian university calendar was perfect to accommodate CFA training. The last day of class for most Canadian universities was in the first week of May versus the second or third week in the United States, so all the dorms were empty, leaving the campus wide open to take in 600+ finance professionals. For decades, until very recently, the CFA exams were administered the first Saturday after the U.S. Memorial Day holiday. The reliability of the exam date and the Canadian university calendar made for the optimal relationship.

So, on the second Sunday of May each year, candidates across all three levels of the exam arrived in Windsor to check into their dorm rooms, collect their seminar materials, and prepare for class. Just like the classes of a university, you could always tell who the Level 1 candidates were. They arrived with this look of optimism and wonder – eager to hear exam tips and the gory details of simple linear regression, present value calculations, and bond duration. Alternatively, the Level 3’s knew exactly where they were going. They had grizzled looks and wore the battle scars of having given up the last three or so years of their lives to the CFA program – the end in sight but still elusive and uncertain.

Faculty, staff, and attendees all stayed in the dormitories. You could either share a room with a complete stranger or spend the extra dough to secure a single room – which were in short supply. As you might expect, none of the rooms had air-conditioning, and early May in Windsor could get quite hot. The attendee welcome pack always included the obligatory SSFA-branded umbrella because rain was often in the forecast and the walk between the dorms, cafeteria, and academic buildings could be miserable without something over your head.

Ed’s assistant Donna McKnight was a master of logistics. Between the two of them, they planned the seminar schedule, worked with university catering staff, assigned instructors, and made sure everything ran smoothly. I had a great deal of respect for Donna. You could tell that without her, SSFA wouldn’t have functioned properly.

Ed Rosenbaum the Comedian

Breakfast and lunch were included in the seminar fee and were catered each day by university staff in the main cafeteria. At lunch, Ed would come into the cafeteria wearing some kind of goofy hat – his signature move. My favorite was his foam crab hat. You know the foam fingers they give out at football games? It was that same material, only bright red and in the shape of a crab. If you didn’t know him, Ed could look quite stern and unapproachable – I think he wore the hats to disarm attendees and signal that he was lighthearted on the inside. With that crab hat on, it was really hard to take him seriously.

There was a podium at the end of the room, and when Ed stepped to the microphone, a hush came over the crowd. Although Ed was a small man in physical stature, he commanded a certain unspoken intellectual presence. During his brief remarks, Ed would talk about what was happening at the seminar that day, but as the silly hat signaled, he always had a joke for the room. Remember that we’re talking about the mid-1990s – some of Ed’s jokes were, at the time, ‘salty’ and would have no chance of being told today in a professional setting. Let’s just say that many of them involved a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar – that’s all I’ll say…

You didn’t come to Windsor to hear Ed tell jokes, but they were his thing, and everyone appreciated the levity.

Crashing and Burning From 30,000 Feet

The role of the instructor at Windsor was extraordinarily difficult. Anybody who was anybody in CFA Review got their start with Ed. Bob Stalla, Maceo K Sloan, Carl Schweser, Dave Wiley, Dave Hetherington, Greg Filbeck, Tim Smaby, Andrew Holmes, John Harris, and many others cut their teeth at SSFA. It was one of the most pressure-packed teaching environments I’ve ever been in.

The reason for this pressure was that for any given topic, there was a real-world expert in the room who worked with that formula or concept every day and had a strong opinion about it. If there were 200 candidates in a lecture hall, 198 of them didn’t have a firm grasp on the concepts, but the remaining two potentially knew more than you did as the lecturer. To his credit, Ed knew this dynamic well and he would start lecturers off with small teaching loads to test their ability to navigate this fact about SSFA.

I’ve seen grown men reduced to a pool of Jell-O because the room ate them alive for not having a solid grasp on the material. Professors who were used to teaching green undergraduates withered in the onslaught of criticism from the know-it-alls in the room. To survive and thrive at SSFA, you had to know intimately how the curriculum was applied on the exam because attendees would try to correlate what you were teaching to how investment markets really functioned. I had the luxury of having Carl Schweser as my mentor and guide – he taught me that what really mattered was how a concept was treated on the exam, not in real life. So, my go-to line for Mr. Know-It-All was to thank him for the information and then remind everyone to not get distracted by real life, and instead focus on the test. Worked every time. Whew!

Ed did everything he could to protect lecturers from the fate of the know-it-alls, but invariably a new lecturer would leave the seminar early because he or she couldn’t handle the pressure. We called it “Crashing and Burning From 30,000 Feet.” It was an incredibly real and personal illustration of the behavior of crowds and group-think in which normally rational individuals would turn on an instructor because the stakes were so high.

Ed Rosenbaum the Coach

To help lecturers succeed over time, Ed was laser focused on attendee feedback. He didn’t oversurvey, but he ensured that all attendees provided constructive feedback on everything from the food, to accommodations, to teaching quality. There was an instructor evaluation for every teaching module of the program. As a lecturer, you knew where you stood relative to the others and that fostered an environment of friendly competition to win the hearts and minds of attendees.

Ed cared deeply about my success because he knew that if I was successful, so was he. Outcomes would improve and the word-of-mouth promotional engine would spin faster and faster. After the Seminar, he would call me to review the results and use the detailed feedback data he collated to guide the conversation. If I did well in the rankings, pay and bonuses would rise and I’d get more teaching responsibility the next year. If a lecturer didn’t garner good feedback he or she was not invited back.

I deeply appreciated Ed’s candor and his ability to be gentle but pointed with his feedback. To this day, I try to emulate Ed’s calm but purposeful demeanor in difficult conversations. He didn’t dig for dirt or get swayed by opinion, instead, he relied on objective data and used it to engage in a constructive conversation with you about performance. We can all learn from Ed’s style. Like all good coaches, he relied on the data, formulated a holistic opinion, and communicated extremely effectively.

The Thursday Night Dinner

Every Thursday of the seminar, Ed would take faculty and staff to a nice restaurant in Detroit to celebrate. My favorite was when he took us to The Whitney[5], which is still located in the "romanesque revival mansion" of a former Detroit lumber baron. Intimate with great food!

The buzz amongst the faculty regarding where we would go for the Thursday dinner started almost as soon as the seminar began, and the most important discussion was about the wine list. We had a few wine snobs in our midst, so getting this right and ensuring the restaurant had what we needed was critical to the success of the seminar. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but it did seem like the wine at Thursday dinner was really important.

Each year when I was a lecturer, the faculty would try to outdo themselves on the wine selection. During the 1997 Seminar, we were at The Whitney and Carl decided he was going to perform a vertical taste test of Chateau Lafite Rothschild[6]. There was a 1962 and 1992 on the wine list, and Carl ordered one of each. The sommelier laid out the glasses for the test in front of us and made a big production of the whole thing.

We were all very excited about the test and we had gathered other onlookers. One by one, as we tried the ’62 we each had very puzzled looks on our faces – our palates were expecting a luxury experience, but what we tasted was akin to an old shoe. The ’92 was infinitely better and we all concluded that ’62 must have been a bad year.

The problem was when they brought the ‘62 out of the cellar, they didn’t let it breathe or strain it. They just poured it right out of the bottle after uncorking it in front of us! Of course, it was going to taste like my grandmother’s doily – the sommelier completely botched the test. In retrospect, I don’t remember seeing the little spoon with the holes in it around his neck, so maybe the dishwasher was filling in as sommelier that night.

Ed had left dinner before the test began, so he didn’t know how expensive the test was. The next day, after reviewing the bill, Ed very nonchalantly went up to Carl and said, “Carl, that wine you bought last night cost more than my first car!” Needless to say, the wine selections in 1998 were much more carefully controlled.

Ed had this wonderful way of letting you know where you stood with no yelling and handled everything with an even keel – something I try to emulate today.

Friday Night!

The seminar concluded at lunchtime on Saturday, and many attendees started leaving on Saturday morning to catch flights to all corners of the world. SSFA was an intense mental experience for attendees, so Ed threw a party on the last night of the seminar.

When I first began lecturing at SSFA, this party consisted of some light cocktail music and a few Labatt’s. Nothing too elaborate – just some brain-dead candidates milling about commiserating about their expectations of how far behind they were in their studies or their likely fate on exam day. It was clear who was feeling more confident after the week and those who were woefully under-prepared for the challenge ahead. The unprepared were usually those who hadn’t cracked the spine of a book until they arrived at SSFA – somehow believing that SSFA faculty were going to perform a miracle or Vulcan Mind Meld to instantaneously transfer the curriculum, and the ability to understand it, in a week.

But I digress… through the 1990s, the Friday party became more and more elaborate due in no small part to two attendees – Dennis Dugan and Chris Bellefeuille. Dennis was a bond trader from Memphis and Chris worked investments in Toronto. These were both wonderful, fun-loving men who ended up becoming the self-appointed entertainment directors of SSFA. They had a knack for taking traditional songs like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz and rewriting the lyrics[7] to become “Somewhere South of Toronto” from The Wizard of Odds. Get it? Windsor is south and west of Toronto, and Ed Rosenbaum was The Wizard of Odds of you passing the CFA exam.

There were also skits like The Ed RosenSullivan Show and a great Johnny Carson-esque bit where Chris would pretend to be Ed pretending to be Carson in his Carnac the Magnificent[8] routine. My personal favorite was the time I was enlisted to play Olivia Newton-John in a Grease skit. They rewrote the lyrics to “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and turned them into “Hopelessly Stuck at Level Two.” The lyrics went something like this:

If you’ve read my previous work, you know that I’m a singer at my core, and these guys corralled me for these parts. So much so that they dressed me up as Olivia and Dorothy – complete with wigs, a leather jacket and poodle skirt for Olivia, and gingham dress and ruby heels for Dorothy.

For The Wizard of Odds song, the lyrics were even better:

Just so you know what a great sport I am (and completely devoid of any shame), here’s the link to a very grainy video of the Somewhere South of Toronto skit for your enjoyment. I’ll be hiding under a rock the rest of my life and I’m sure you’ll never look at me the same way again. Ed was also a good sport in all these skits and supported the tomfoolery wholeheartedly.

The really cool thing was that for at least a year or so, Dennis and Chris came back to SSFA after earning their charters to continue their cruise director roles. Oh yeah, and they’d also fill garbage cans with water and lean them up against the doors of unsuspecting faculty in the middle of the night, rap on the door, and run. Ah boys…

A Graceful Exit

Ed retired from teaching at the University of Windsor in 1994 and SSFA in 2002 with the sale of the business to Kaplan. SSFA is still part of our portfolio of CFA Review offerings. Class sizes are a bit more intimate due mostly to the broader range of study options available to candidates today versus 20 or 30 years ago. The geographic makeup of attendees is less diverse, focused mainly on students from Canada and the U.S. This reduction in diversity is a real shame – I loved meeting people from all over the world who would travel vast distances to attend SSFA.

As you might expect, SSFA is more professional and buttoned-up today relative to when Carl and I taught there in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the objective remains the same – provide a high-quality, intensive instructional environment to improve a candidate’s likelihood of passing one of the most rigorous testing regimes in the world.

Conclusion

I’m a little ashamed that I lost track of Ed in his later years. In the last two years of his life, Ed moved to Israel and was buried there upon his death. The University of Windsor honored Ed by placing all flags at half-staff – which is really cool. I can only hope to have made such an impact on those around me as Ed did. He was an incredible man and I owe a debt of gratitude to him that I am only repaying in a very small way through this tribute.

There are tens of thousands of prospective candidates that Ed touched over his career and likely thousands of charterholders who owe their exam success, in part, to Ed and the rest of the SSFA crew. If you knew Ed and he had a positive impact on you, I encourage you to leave your story in the comments section of this article. I’m sure he would appreciate it and I would love to hear more about how this gentle giant made his mark on the profession. Ed was truly the Wizard of Odds.

Rest in peace Ed.

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[1] To learn more about the history of the CFA Institute, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Financial_Analyst#History

[2] The program is now called Windsor Week and is owned by Kaplan. https://www.schweser.com/cfa/level-1/review-seminars/windsor-week

[3] Yes, I’m aware I’m not supposed to use CFA as a noun, but we’ll do so in this article so we’re using common candidate vernacular.

[4] For a sample, see https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/cea/economic-report-of-the-President/2017

[5] To visit The Whitney, see https://www.thewhitney.com/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_Lafite_Rothschild

[7] All credit for these farcical lyrics go to Chris Bellefeuille and Dennis Dugan

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent

Thank you to Cassie Jewell and Carl Schweser for helping to jog my memory on a few details for this article. A huge thank you goes to Linda Temte and Kevin Schultz for digging up the video of "Somewhere South of Toronto" - especially Kevin, who had to watch it several times during the editing process!

Dr. Rosenbaum passed away June 4, 2018 in Israel. https://educationnewscanada.com/article/education/level/university/1/706151/b-campus-mourns-death-of-retired-business-professor-edward-rosenbaum.html