Peter A. Blackwood is a Managing Director, and heads the Technology and Media investment banking group at Philadelphia-based Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, a bank whose roots go back to 1832, and probably the most prominent mid-Atlantic regional full-service investment bank, broker-dealer and asset manager (with more than $55 billion in assets under management). Prior to joining Janney in 2009, Peter was a Principal and Head of the Internet and Digital Media Group at Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. He joined Merriman from SoundView Technology Group, and began his career at E*OFFERING, a startup investment bank later acquired by SoundView. He went to school at Ohio Wesleyan University. (click to enlarge)

I met Peter at Merriman not quite 10 years ago when we were working with a digital media company headquartered in London, which was at length acquired by a larger digital media company that Peter had worked with. We had

David Fondrie is a Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager for the Select Value Fund at Heartland Advisors in Milwaukee (www.americasvalueinvestor.com). He joined Heartland in 1994, and subsequently served as Heartland's Director of Equity Research for 10 years from 2001 to 2011. He also held the position of CEO of Heartland Funds from 2006 to 2012. He's a Badger from the University of Wisconsin, and served with the armed forces in Korea. He started his career with Price Waterhouse and is a CPA. Our paths have crossed repeatedly over the years since we had interests in some of the same companies. Like many Midwesterners, he is a plain-spoken man.

Dave Fondrie, Heartland Advisors Inc.

We had an opportunity to chat on March 1, the day the much-discussed government spending sequester went into effect. We talked about the sequester and about the kind of growth he foresees in 2013,

Warren Isabelle is a Managing Member of Ironwood Investment Management LLC, located in Boston. Ironwood is a prominent small-cap investor, defining small-cap as below $2.5 billion in market cap. Prior to forming Ironwood in 1997, Warren was Head of Domestic Equities for Pioneer Capital Growth Fund, Pioneer Small Company Fund and several institutional portfolios. Before joining Pioneer in 1984 he was an analyst with Hartford Insurance Company. He is a bit of a polymath, with a U Mass BS in Chemistry, an MS in Polymer Science and Engineering, and an MBA from Wharton. He has been the subject of articles in Barron's, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.

I first met Warren at Pioneer in the early 1990s, and had the pleasure of talking to him late last week about his outlook for the year ahead.

JA: What are your predictions for 2013

Mary Lisanti is president and portfolio manager of AH Lisanti, an investment management company currently focused on small cap growth companies. She is a 33-year veteran of small cap growth research and investing. For the first 12 years she was a small cap analyst and strategist on Wall Street. During the past 18 years, she has managed small cap portfolios at premier asset management companies.

As CIO of ING Investments LLC, (1998-2003) she was responsible for building the active equity management team, and assets under management in her area grew from several hundred million to several billion dollars. Prior to ING, Mary was at Strong Capital Management as Senior Portfolio Manager for both the Small Cap Growth and Mid Cap Growth Strategies and was Managing Director and Head of the Small/Mid Cap team at Bankers Trust Company. Mary was named Fund Manager of the Year in 1996 by Barron's.

Boniface A. ("Buzz") Zaino is a portfolio manager advising several of the high-profile Royce Funds, to wit, the Royce Opportunity Fund and associated funds. By any measure a veteran of the industry, Buzz has more than 40 years of experience in the financial services industry, the last 14 with Royce. I first met him when he was managing the Value Added Funds for Trust Company of the West more than 20 years ago, but prior to that he was president of the Lehman Capital Fund and a principal of the "original" Lehman Brothers. He went to school at Fordham, and took his MBA from Columbia. In 44 years, Buzz has seen enough economic cycles to offer an MBA from the University of Zaino.

Buzz agreed to talk about his 2013 outlook from his home in Aspen which, like much of the US snow belt, has seen little of the white

Nicholas F. Galluccio is President and CEO of Teton Advisors, Inc., based in Rye NY, which runs a family of listed mutual funds under the family name of Teton Westwood, and representing a range of investment strategies. Teton Advisors is itself listed under the ticker "TETAA." It is affiliated with Gamco Investors, Inc. (NYSE: GBL), a large and well-known diversified asset manager and financial services firm.

Nick was a journalist early in his career, starting as a staff writer at Forbes, and moving into the financial services business as a semiconductor analyst at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. He and I first met during the 25 years he spent at Trust Company of the West, where he was Group Managing Director and headed smallcap value and midcap value funds. Seven years after TCW was acquired by Societe Generale, he joined Teton Advisors, and has built the platform to $1.2 billion