Karen Hiatt, CFA, is a Senior Portfolio Manager, a Managing Director and CIO Focused Growth Equities with Allianz Global Investors, which she joined in 1998. She manages all focused-growth strategies. Earlier, Ms. Hiatt was a senior research analyst, sector head of the U.S. consumer team and U.S. Director of Research. She has 22 years of investment-industry experience. Ms. Hiatt was previously a vice president and analyst at Bioscience Securities, a boutique investment bank. She has a B.S. in finance, cum laude, from Santa Clara University. In her exclusive interview with the Wall Street Transcript, Ms. Hiatt explains her investment methodology:
“We are a global money manager, really diversified across assets, as well as client base. In terms of what I work on specifically here, it’s the Focused Large Cap Growth portfolio, very fundamentally driven. And what I mean by that is, we construct a portfolio, really on a stock-by-stock approach, meaning we try to pick the best stocks within our platform, with a growth and quality bias, trying to stay valuation-sensitive, really focusing on a risk/reward approach, picking the best stocks we can to ultimately construct a very concentrated portfolio. We try to keep the stock count below 40 stocks, which leaves really a portfolio driven by stock-specific dynamics.”
Karen Hiatt sees a number of opportunities in the current market.
“We still, on a global basis, have a long way to go in terms of moving total payments from cash to credit. When you think about e-commerce, it requires some sort of credit option for the most part, or at least a payment option. Again, mobile provides payment and the digital necessity of digitizing the opportunity to take payment from one company or person to another company or person. Security really matters.
So you put all that together, and Visa, specifically, really takes on very little balance sheet risk to deploy payments on a global basis. And less than 20% of payments are digital still. So there’s a long way to go in terms of market opportunity. So PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL), Square (NYSE:SQ) and Visa (NYSE:V) are three examples of stocks in the payment thematic.”
To get all of Karen Hiatt’s recent stock buys for her portfolio, read the entire interview in the Wall Street Transcript.
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