Peter E. Grassi discusses Grassi Investment Management, LLC. On the equity side, Mr. Grassi invests in large caps. On the fixed income side, he invests in individual taxable and tax-free bonds. Mr. Grassi mostly deals with high net worth individuals. His goal is to preserve capital and use conservative means to grow it. Mr. Grassi believes interest rates will increase over the next two to five years. With this increase, he sees opportunities in financials, industrials, materials and some energy. Within financials, Mr. Grassi feels money-centered banks and brokerage firms are especially positioned to benefit.
Full interview available here.
Denise M. Farkas discusses Sigma Investment Counselors. The firm manages money for high net worth individuals. Ms. Farkas aims to be well-diversified among and between asset classes. She thinks it’s important to help her clients design an investment plan and stick to it. Ms. Farkas believes this will help investors stay the course and not respond emotionally. In addition, Ms. Farkas advises that investors should have a sense of their risk capacity and risk tolerance. She describes risk capacity as an investor’s ability to take on risk and risk tolerance as an investor’s ability to sleep at night.
Full interview available here.
Keith Dicker discusses IceCap Asset Management Ltd. Mr. Dicker is a global macro manager, and due to his offshore background, he does not have a home-country bias. His investment approach focuses on absolute returns and avoiding downside risk. To achieve this, Mr. Dicker allocates across equities, fixed income, currencies, cash and commodities. This gives him the opportunity to be flexible with his allocations. Looking ahead, Mr. Dicker sees a big bubble in fixed income, especially in sovereign debt. Anticipating a break in the bond market, Mr. Dicker is positive on equities right now, and he performs analysis to determine which of the 10 key sectors is most sensitive to the bond market.
Full interview available here.
Greg Dean discusses the Cambridge Global Asset Management division of CI Investments Inc. Mr. Dean describes his investment process as following the cash. He also spends a lot of time looking at a company’s business-model quality. Rather than focus on net income or earnings, Mr. Dean likes to analyze cash flow. This allows for a standard comparison across businesses and geographies, and less of a margin for error. He also likes management teams with a track record of strong capital allocation. He finds this process particularly helpful when investing in growth-oriented stocks.
Full interview available here.
Curtis J. Holden discusses Tanglewood Wealth Management, Inc. Tanglewood is a fee-only adviser. Mr. Holden believes this is an advantage because there isn’t any pressure to sell products and the firm is an independent company. The primary focus of the firm is to look out for its clients’ total financial health. Instead of designing a one-size-fits-all strategy, Mr. Holden offers six different approaches to help find the right fit for each client’s stage of life and comfort level with risk and volatility. Tanglewood is a disciplined company and tries to instill that same discipline in its clients. Mr. Holden’s hope is that providing clients with an investment approach where they can feel comfortable will encourage them to stay focused for the long term.
Full interview available here.
Nathan Moser discusses Pax World Investments and the Pax Small Cap Fund. Mr. Moser believes he can produce superior risk-adjusted returns over time through active management and investing in high-quality, attractively valued companies. His strategy also focuses on downside risk. Risk is one of the key barriers to the small-cap space for investors, so Mr. Moser seeks to mitigate risk as much as possible. Mr. Moser’s overall process starts with a quantitative multifactor screen to narrow the investable universe. From there, he conducts fundamental research alongside analysis of a company’s environmental, social and governance factors, which adds insight into the quality of a company and its management team and helps to identify risk.
Full interview available here.
Christopher P. Brown Jr. discusses his firm’s Total Return Fund, which is a U.S.-focused multisector fixed income fund. One of the core tenets of the strategy is to have a higher tracking error or higher volatility relative to the index, which is the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond index. Mr. Brown believes that core fixed income is now and in the future will be a very important part of the broader asset allocation, despite concerns about rising rates.
Full interview available here.
Brian Gilmartin discusses Trinity Asset Management Inc. Mr. Gilmartin mainly focuses on sector rotation. His investment style combines a bottom-up and top-down process. While he will try to get a feel for where the economy is headed and how consumers are doing, 80% to 90% of his time is spent identifying sectors and stocks through fundamentals. Due to the changing political environment in the U.S., Mr. Gilmartin believes that financials, large-cap tech, telecom and possibly health care are sectors that may benefit.
Full interview available here.
Brett Rabatin covers the Texas and West Coast bank group. Mr. Rabatin looks for names that are either growing or going through a long-term improvement in core operations and profitability. He says that over the intermediate term there could be more upside from the space, but there’s fair argument that a lot of the benefit of things happening is already baked into the valuations. He says investors should be looking for where there are catalysts for earnings to be better than expected or for valuations to improve.
Full interview available here.
Aaron James Deer discusses his midcap Western bank coverage. Mr. Deer says the recent surge for banks is sustainable as long as political outcomes match up with expectations. He says that generally speaking, his earning estimates are rising, which stems from the upward shift of the yield curve and rising expectations for additional rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
Full interview available here.
