People

Steven W. Ballentine ’83 BS

Steven W. Ballentine ’83 BS is the founder of the Ballentine Investment Institute. Ballentine ispresident and CEO of Ballentine Capital Management, an investment management firm he founded in 1989. Ballentine has been a portfolio manager and analyst for more than 20 years. He started his investment career at the Prudential Insurance Company of America (1983-1987), where he managed the $2 billion Prudential-Bache Utility Fund and the Prudential Equity Income Fund. Immediately prior to forming Ballentine Capital, Ballentine was a partner in a private investment management firm, specializing in long/short utility strategies (1987-1989).

Ballentine is a 1983 summa cum laude graduate of Syracuse University, where he now serves as a member of the Board of Trustees, sitting on the Board’s Investment & Endowment Committee. In addition to wanting to give something significant back to his alma mater, Ballentine was motivated by a desire to “bring the markets alive to the students,” which led to his generous gift in 1992 to SU’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management to create a center with the ambitious, straightforward mission of offering an unparalleled investment education to Whitman students.

Professor Fernando Diz

Professor Fernando Diz is the Martin J. Whitman Professor of Finance and currently serves as the director of the Ballentine Investment Institute and the Equity Analysis Center. After earning his PhD from Cornell in 1989, Diz joined the Syracuse University faculty to offer courses on value and distress investing, derivative securities, and in the more traditional areas of financial economics and corporate finance.  

He keeps his teaching fresh by drawing on examples from his consulting business and current market conditions. “If your research has nothing to do with the realities of business and you try to incorporate that into the class, you lose credibility with students,” Diz says. “I tend to bring experiences from my personal business into the classroom, and students respond positively to that. They crave that kind of experience.” 

He directs The Orange Value Fund, a $1.1 million student-managed fund created with the objective of training Whitman students to become money managers.