Yesterday the Investment Company Institute (ICI) concluded its last Mutual Funds and Investment Management (MFIM) conference in Palm Desert, and the earliest they might come back is 2022.

Nancy Rapoport Boyd School of Law at UNLV Garman Turner Gordon Professor of Law

For many years the Washington, D.C.-based mutual fund industry trade group cycled MFIM, its giant legal conference, back and forth annually between two golf-friendly, winter-weather-escaping locations: the JW Marriott Desert Springs in California's Coachella valley (where about 1,300 fundsters gathered this week); and another JW Marriott in Orlando, Florida. Yet next spring the trade group will shift MFIM to a new cycle, alternating between two more warm-weather, winter-weather-escaping locations, San Antonio (starting in 2018) and San Diego (starting in 2019). The ICI will stick to San Antonio and San Diego for at least four years, through the 2021 conference.

Tammy Salmon, associate general counsel at the ICI, emceed the two sessions for the final day, including a presentation by UNLV business law and ethics professor Nancy Rapoport. Rapoport, who has spoken at the conference before, was "back by popular demand," Salmon told attendees. Rapoport shared ideas on how to build effective, ethical teams, and she warned attendees about cognitive errors, four of them in particular: cognitive dissonance, diffusion of responsibility, anchoring, and social pressure.

Salmon closed out the conference by moderating a panel of six insiders from the across the industry, polling both them and the attendees about potential threats facing mutual fund shops these days. Then it was time for fundsters to head home, though some of those heading back to still icy, snow-covered Northeast ended up enjoying a little extra post-ICI-MFIM time in Palm Desert, one last time. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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