Investment Partners Asset Management Portfolio Manager Gregg Abella is Looking for Global Returns

January 2, 2018

Gregg T. Abella is a Co-Principal and Portfolio Manager at Investment Partners Asset Management. He began his professional career at Chubb & Son in the International Division of the Surety Credit Department handling Latin America and Europe. Mr. Abella subsequently held a number of positions with Chubb, ultimately establishing and managing the Guaranty Department for its subsidiary, Chubb do Brasil, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  In his exclusive interview with the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Abella details the philosophy that fuels his investment picks.

“We do invest in funds and ETFs, for sure, and we also invest directly in individual companies. Within fund sleeves, we try to specialize in unique streams of income through MLPs and business development companies, and then we also like to invest in large, mid and small-cap value and special situation investments. We like closed end funds when they trade at discounts to asset value, and then we use open ends and ETFs to get access to a lot of other different asset classes that we might not have expertise internally, but we do a lot of deep-dive diligence into the funds and fund families, to try to get what we feel are best-in-breed.”

One interesting take is the presence of bank loans in the overall portfolio.  “Bank loans — funds — are exactly as they sound; they are funds that buy corporate senior secured loans that are variable-rate like working capital loans. And as rates go up, the income that you receive off of that stream of investments goes up. So in a rising rate environment, if we have inflation while long-dated bonds might recede in principal, hopefully, by being a senior in the capital structure and having a variable rate, you’d maintain principal and possibly even get capital appreciation.  The one fund in particular that does this strategy is the Oppenheimer Senior Floating Rate Fund; the symbol is OOSYX.”

To get more investment recommendations from Gregg Abella, read the entire interview at the Wall Street Transcript.