Lenore Elle Hawkins is an investor, a perpetual student of economics, a great lover of fine wines, and an exuberant dancer, particularly while cooking. She possesses an excessive adoration of dogs, an overabundance of stilettos, and an endless desire to find the humor in life.

Lenore is a founding partner at Meritas Advisors, where she serves as the firm's chief investment strategist, with over 20 years of experience in finance, strategic planning, risk management, and asset valuation; her focus is primarily on macroeconomic influences and long-term trends. In addition to her duties for Meritas clients in the United States, she also provides consulting services for ultra-high-net-worth families in Europe. She is also the co-manager of the Growth Seeker portfolio for TheStreet along with Chris Versace, her co-author for this investing tome, and is the author of the blog EllesEconomy.com.

Lenore is a regular guest on a variety of national and international radio and television shows. She appears frequently with Neil Cavuto, on both of his Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel program, along with Maria Bartiromo and Stuart Varney on the Fox Business Network. She has often appeared on One America's News Network, RT and America's Morning News as well as having been featured multiple times on Real Vision Television. She is also a regular speaker at international investing conferences.

Lenore previously served as the vice president of corporate development for a boutique wealth management firm, which provided coordinated financial planning, investment management, tax, insurance and estate planning services to its high-net-worth clients. Before that, she served as the vice president of strategic planning and corporate development for National Mobile Television, the largest mobile broadcasting company in the United States, where she was responsible for evaluation of investment opportunities and the design and implementation of complex corporate financial and operational structures. Lenore has also worked with JP Morgan in the Private Client Services practice. She began her career with Accenture, where she led consulting teams advising financial services clients, such as the Capital Group (a group of investment management companies including the American Funds, Capital Bank and Trust, and Capital International Funds), Industrial Indemnity, and Charles Schwab.

Lenore is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, whose members include Nobel Prize recipients, economic and financial experts, high government officials, and legal scholars from all over the world. She is also on the board of directors for The Dreyfuss Initiative, founded by Richard Dreyfuss, whose objective is to provide America's youth and society at large with the tools necessary to be effective stewards of a representative democracy. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics from Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna and an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

Lenore enjoys two bases for her work, one in sunny San Diego, California, and the other in the beautiful town of Genoa, Italy, which lies south of Milan, between Portofino and Monte Carlo on the Mediterranean Sea. While logging entirely too many frequent-flier miles every year for any sane person, the dual continental life seems to suit her, as she believes that nothing beats Genovese pesto and a rich Barolo, except perhaps dinner on the Pacific Ocean in Del Mar with a big bowl of guacamole, fish tacos, and a spicy marguerita on the rocks with salt.

On the opposite side of the ledger is Chris Versace, better known as The Thematic Investor and otherwise referred to as the seat-stealer, a self-proclaimed nerd who has been analyzing industries, companies, and stocks for more than 20 years. While many were sweating the thought of what job they were going to find out of college, Chris, ever the contrarian, was busy planning a backpack tour through Europe. After his return, he spent the next two years teaching high school, then landed a career in equity research that has spanned several bulge bracket investment banks and more miles hopping the globe than he cares to remember. From industrial equipment and machinery to homebuilders and building products to technology and more, he's covered them all.

After several years of near-constant travel across the United States, Europe, and Asia, during which time he met with both big and small corporate management teams to bend their ears and hit them with a barrage of questions designed to improve his understanding of their business and where it was headed, he was burned out. After taking some time off, he started creating portfolios for others and worked with some boutique investment banks on several transactions before returning to the research world with his own product—The Thematic Investor newsletter. Aimed at institutional and individual investors, Thematic looked at the intersection of economics, demographics, psychographics, technology, regulatory mandates, and more to ferret out those companies and their respective shares that were best positioned to ride major tailwinds of change. Ultimately, Thematic morphed into Tematica Research, a firm that serves up thematic insights to seasoned investors as well as professional investors and corporate clients. Tematica is home to the investment newsletter Tematica Investing and The Monday Morning Kickoff as well as related trading services. Along the way, he has written a weekly column for the Washington Times, become a contributor to Real Money Pro at TheStreet and FoxBusiness.com, and become a professor at the New Jersey City University (NJCU) School of Business. He also co-manages the Growth Seeker and Trifecta portfolios for The Street.

Chris is a frequent guest on radio and TV programs, including Making Money with Charles Payne and Cavuto on the Fox Business Network, TheStreet TV, One American News Network, America's Morning News, The Chris Salcedo Show, The Sam Sorbo Show, The Edward Woodson Show, and several others. He is a frequent speaker and panel facilitator at The Money Show, Freedom Fest, and the American Association of Individual Investors.

Chris has also hosted PowerTalk, a weekly podcast that looked at key issues across a range of industries with guests such as Steve Forbes, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. John Lott, Lou Dobbs, Niall Ferguson, Stephen Moore, Charlie Gasparino, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, and Peter Schiff. On the program, he also conducted long-format interviews with executives from General Motors, Visa, Qualcomm, InterDigital, IBM, Cisco Systems, Skyworks Solutions, Slingbox, KEYW Holding, Domino's Pizza, Panera Bread, Smith & Wesson, Staples, and others, as well as discussed industry-shaping events with key members at the Consumer Electronics Association, the National Association of Development Companies, and the Truckload Carriers Association. Talking with people in the know and to companies is a great way to connect the dots and put things into perspective, and Chris is noodling a return to podcasting. Stay tuned.

Like Lenore, Chris is a voracious reader, a collector of data points, and a firm believer that simply trusting in headline reporting to understand what is truly happening in the world, in an industry or with a company, is likely going to get you into trouble. He dons his Sherlock Holmes–style investing cap, digs deep into the data, and wades through all sorts of reports, financial filings, and third-party surveys and studies to put the pieces together.

Chris's indulgences run the gamut from dark chocolate and red wine to attending more than 35 Bruce Springsteen concerts. For Chris, Springsteen is all about the intensity. Even in his 60s, the man can rock the house, spending up to four hours on stage, tracing his rich back-catalog of songs or trotting out a cover tune that brings the house down. As comedian John Stewart said of Springsteen, “He empties the tank,” and that's what Chris does when looking at the palate of industries, companies, stocks, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Together, Chris and Lenore, using many of the strategies discussed inside Cocktail Investing, co-manage the Growth Seeker model portfolio at TheStreet. We put small and mid-cap companies through their paces, looking at the shifting landscape of economics, demographics, psychographics, technology, policy, and more to identify those companies best positioned to capitalize on thematic tailwinds. At the same time, we look to sidestep those that will be left behind, like the guy who has one too many celebratory cocktails.