Malcolm Gissen's interest in investments began in college when he was a summer clerk at Oppenheimer & Company. Malcolm was a real estate and business lawyer before becoming General Counsel to a San Francisco real estate firm with more than $1 billion in properties. When Malcolm received an offer to join a prominent financial planning firm, he decided to leave the practice of law, and has never looked back.

Malcolm became a Certified Financial Planner and in 1985 established his own firm providing financial planning and investment advisory services to affluent clients. Malcolm is a Registered Investment Advisor and in 2006, launched the Encompass Fund (www.encompassfund.com) with Marshall Berol. As of December 31, 2010, Encompass ranked as the #1 international fund for the trailing 1 and 3-year periods. Malcolm specializes in designing portfolios ideally suited for his clients' needs and finding unusual growth-oriented securities with less risk than investors might expect. Malcolm has been regularly quoted in the financial media and has been interviewed on CNBC numerous times.

He is very involved in non-profit activities promoting children and education and supports his wife as she runs Handful Players (www.handfulplaers.org), a free children's musical theatre for disadvantaged children in the inner city of San Francisco. Malcolm holds a B.S. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

For the past 29 years, Marshall Berol has worked as an investment advisor in San Francisco, specializing in several investment areas. They include special situations, undervalued and underappreciated assets, preferred stocks, resource companies, and real estate investments of all types. He has been a contrarian and deep value investor for 35 years, often finding opportunities where less astute investors fail to look. Marshall has expertise in several market sectors, including precious metals, oil and gas, uranium, rare earth metals, antimony, financial services companies and real estate investment trusts (REIT's). Prior to becoming an investment advisor, he was in the private practice of law for 17 years. He attended the University of California-Berkeley and the University of San Francisco School of Law.

Marshall has been a featured speaker at numerous investment conferences, is often interviewed by the financial media, and has regularly made television appearances as an investment expert. He has been the Chief Investment Officer of Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates since 1999. In 2006, Mr. Berol co-founded the Encompass Fund (www.encompassfund.com) , the number 1 ranked world stock fund as of December 31, 2010 for the previous 1 and 3-year periods. The Encompass Fund posted a return of 137% in 20009 and 60% in 2010.

Craig Valdes began his career in the securities industry when he joined Sutro & Company in 1982 as a Registered Representative. Craig became more interested in analyzing securities and portfolio management and in 1993, accepted a position as Assistant Portfolio Manager with the San Francisco firm of Hutchison Richardson Investment Management. Craig became a partner in the firm and a Senior Portfolio Manager with primary responsibilities for client relationships and investment decisions for the firm's institutional pension fund assets, hedge fund, and individual accounts.

Craig's tracks stocks ranging from large-cap to micro-cap. Because he is in charge of the trading desk for Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates, Craig watches market movements closely, tracking trading volumes, and momentum among both market sectors and individual stocks. Among the sectors that particularly interest Craig are technology, health care and biopharmaceuticals though his portfolios have always been highly diversified. Craig is the Director of Research at Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates and is responsible for the firm's relationships with other brokerage firms and analysts. He is also the firm'sChief Compliance Officer.

A native of Iowa, Craig studied finance and economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An avid tennis player, Craig plays competitive tennis all around Northern California and Hawaii.

Kevin Puil grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in economics. He became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and worked for several leading Canadian money management firms as a Portfolio Manager for more than 10 years, specializing in Canadian metals and oil & gas companies. In those positions, Kevin participated in dozens of private offerings of stocks and developed skills in analyzing junior mining companies operating throughout the world.

Kevin moved to California and joined Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates in 2008 and Senior Portfolio Manager. He has helped the firm develop working relationships with several of the top Canadian brokerage firms and has brought clients of the firm a number of attractive opportunities to invest in private offerings of stock.

As a Chartered Financial Analyst, Kevin conducts detailed analysis of companies and their finances and seeks undervalued companies selling at a discount to the company's intrinsic value or net asset value. Kevin tracks a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, oil, gas and coal, alternative energy, and metals.

The four professionals at Malcolm H. Gissen & Associates each brings a different perspective to investing. This makes for lively and ongoing debate that has helped client portfolios in many respects. All four believe in conducting extensive due diligence on all companies in which they consider investing and believe in visiting the companies and getting to know management well, whenever possible. This has meant that they have travelled from 14,500 feet in the Andes Mountains in Chile to the far north of the Northwest Territories of Canada conducting due diligence on portfolio companies. This is one more way in which the firm is different from most other money managers in the US.