About Stephen Foerster

Award Winning Author

My Story

Stephen Foerster is a Professor of Finance at Ivey Business School, where he has taught since 1987. He received a BA (Honors Business Administration) from the University of Western Ontario, and an MA and PhD from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He obtained the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation in 1997 and has taught Financial Management, Investments, and Portfolio Management courses in the HBA, MBA, and Executive MBA Programs. He has been honoured to have won numerous teaching and research awards. He was the founding co-director of Ivey’s Women in Asset Management program.

Foerster is the award-winning author of Trailblazers, Heroes, and Crooks: Stories to Make You a Smarter Investor (Wiley, 2024); In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest (with Andrew Lo, Princeton University Press, 2021); Financial Management: Concepts and Applications (Pearson, 2014); and Financial Management: A Primer (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). He writes regularly for his blog, The Perfect Portfolio Investing Blog, on medium.com.

Foerster has written over 100 cases and technical notes in the areas of investments and financial management. He has over 50 publications including empirical studies in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, as well as practitioner-oriented publications such as Financial Analysts Journal. He has also co-authored Cases in Financial Management and is editor of Finance and Money Market Cases.

Foerster has been a consultant, expert witness, and executive training course designer and facilitator in portfolio management, finance for non-financial executives, value-based management, risk management and other investment areas. He’s a member of the Advisory Board of Financial Economics Network (FEN) Courses, Cases and Teaching Abstracts Journal and a former member of the Editorial Board of Financial Analysts Journal and Pacific-Basin Finance Journal. He’s currently a member of Western University’s joint pension board, was formerly a director and chair of the Investment Committee of Foundation Western (Western’s alumni endowment fund), and was on the Advisory Board of Tremont Capital Opportunity Trust.

Foerster has four children and he lives in London, Ontario. He enjoys golfing and hiking, which in both cases for him often involves a walk in the woods.