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Guests & Co-Hosts

Aaron Renn

Aaron M. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a Contributing Editor at its quarterly magazine City Journal. He is on a mission to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse 21st century. This requires building a future that is both demographically and economically sustainable and equitable. It means creating an engine of opportunity and upward mobility, and a platform on which a broad majority of citizens can build towards achieving their aspirations.

Renn is also an economic development columnist for Governing Magazine, and has contributed to the Guardian, Forbes.com and other publications. His perspectives on urban issues are regularly cited in global media outlets which have included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the Economist, and the London Daily Telegraph.

His insights are rooted in a 15 year career in management and technology consulting, where he was a partner at Accenture. He’s held multiple technology strategy roles, and directed multi-million dollar global technology implementations. He also founded the urban data analytics web startup Telestrian.

No stranger to the Internet or urban issues, Renn is a long time innovator in these fields. He was co-author of an early social-networking platform at Indiana University in 1991. He created multiple widely used open source software packages, including the only program ever developed for recovering data from corrupted gzip backups. In 1998 he launched one of the nation’s first blogs, the Weekly Breakdown, to cover the Chicago Transit Authority.

A native of Laconia, Indiana, a town of 50 people along the Ohio River, Renn grew up fascinated by those larger places known as cities, and made it his life’s preoccupation to learn what makes them tick. He currently lives in New York.

Chris Manns

Christopher Manns manages PTI Securities & Futures’ global commodities area and is a research analyst. He devotes much of his time to monitoring and analyzing the latest international commodities reports and financial research. This allows him to keep the firm’s management well informed so that they can, in turn, apprise their clients on pertinent information. Christopher has more than 18 years of securities and financial services experience. Prior to joining PTI Securities, he was a floor broker for AE Staley at the Chicago Board of Trade, and worked for the grain division of Rodman & Renshaw. He has authored many commodities articles and training materials, and speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese. Christopher earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Christopher lives with his wife in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. Read more.

John Neal

John Neal directs PTI Securities’ Glendale, Arizona office serving the firm’s clients in the Phoenix metro area and across the Western U.S. He oversees day-to-day operations, including client services, investor education, staff management and marketing. John has more than 12 years of management experience in the securities and financial services industry. He joined PTI Securities in 2003 in this role. Prior to that time, he was a branch manager with Phoenix area firms, Granite Capital Management and, most recently, Independent Financial Management. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, John earned a bachelor’s degree in international management from Arizona State University in Tempe. Away from work, John enjoys reading, live music and outdoor activities. He also volunteers with the St. Vincent De Paul Society and the Lupus Foundation of America. Married with two children, John and his family live in Peoria, Arizona.

David Andalman

Technical Analyst, DACS Research, PTI Securities & Futures

David Andalman joins the Stocks & Jocks show every Monday and Wednesday morning. He was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois and earned his bachelor's degree in Engineering from the University of Illinois, and then his MBA in Finance and Marketing from Indiana University. David traded for a year at the MidAmerica Commodity Exchange before starting the DACS Research Newsletters on commodity futures, which were the first all-technical research newsletters at the CME. Currently, he has been a senior wealth manager and portfolio strategist for over 23 years. He holds registrations in Series 3, 4 (Options Principal), 7, 55, 63 and is a registered Commodity Trading Advisor. Read more.