What Makes You Unique?

October 17, 2007

Every week at the Wall Street Transcript, we speak to a handful of Portfolio Managers. In 2006, we spoke to over 200. This is only a small part of the Portfolio Management firms in the U.S., not to mention around the world. With so many choices, we here at TWST make sure to let our readers know what makes the Portfolio Managers we speak to unique. TWST asks: What makes you unique?

  • Samuel Dedio, Julius Baer Investment Management: ”First, we have a dedicated team of six analysts (including myself) looking at small cap companies within assigned sectors. We are concentrated in nature, so when you look at our number of holdings versus the number of investment professionals working on them, it’s an average of eight companies per analyst. This shows that there’s quite a bit of research and analysis that goes into the discovery process.
  • Brian M. Barish, Cambiar Investments: “In our concentrated approach, we certainly do have more of a focus on high balance sheet quality, high franchise quality companies than a lot of other value-oriented managers have. We tend to have more S&P 500 as opposed to value-index-like sector weightings and over time that has benefited our results fairly materially. We are privately held. That puts us automatically in a relatively small minority of institutional managers.”
  • Richard Jandrain, Fort Washington Investment Advisors: “Our process is unique, but the other advantage that we have is the people who are behind the process, and that is our team. If you look at our team, we average 20 years of experience. The other thing that we have is that we have been working with each other for 10 years or better. That’s another thing you don’t see in many teams. A lot of times, team is used as kind of a buzzword. It’s not a buzzword for us, it’s a reality.”

For our full investment strategies report, including full interviews with each of the above portfolio managers, click here.