General Investing >> Money Manager Interviews >> January 16, 2024

Global Value Manager Likes Consumer Staples, Health Care and Energy

Mehra, Ajay
Ajay Mehra, Ph.D., is Founder and CIO of Foresight Global Investors, Inc. Prior to founding Foresight, Dr. Mehra served as Managing Director and Head of Equities at Salient Partners where he created and managed the firm’s global equity strategy. Dr. Mehra also served as Managing Director and Head of Manager and Fund Research at UBS where he rebuilt the firm’s manager and fund selection platform and advised on over $300 billion in assets. Previously, as a Partner and Portfolio Manager at private equity firm Columbus Nova, Dr. Mehra co-managed a global macro fund and a long biased global equity fund. Prior to that, Dr. Mehra was Managing Director and Head of Equity Research for State Street Research, where he was the lead portfolio manager for a Health Sciences fund (selected as the Lipper Best Health Sciences Fund 2003 and 2004) and a Large-Cap fund. Dr. Mehra first started managing institutional money at Columbia Management Group where he was a Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager covering media, telecom, and consumer and health care sectors. He started his Wall Street career at Morgan Stanley where he was the firm’s ranked Consumer Products analyst. Before coming to Wall Street, he was Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at West Virginia University’s College of Business and Economics. Dr. Mehra holds a B.S. and MBA from Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, where his doctoral dissertation was selected as a finalist for the Best Dissertation award by the Academy of Management and was subsequently published as a book. He has also published numerous papers on company strategy and industry analysis in leading academic journals. Profile
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TWST: To begin, could you tell our readers how you got started in finance and what led you to establish Foresight?

Mr. Mehra: Well, I got