Start Up to $4 Billion in Assets Under Management: Gregory Hahn Details the Long Road to Successful Portfolio Management

September 6, 2022
Gregory J. Hahn, CFA, is President and Chief Investment Officer at Winthrop Capital Management

Gregory J. Hahn, President and Chief Investment Officer, Winthrop Capital Management

Gregory Hahn is the President and Chief Investment Officer at Winthrop Capital Management, as well as a founding partner.

He leads the firm’s investment team and is responsible for overseeing the firm’s portfolio management, investment strategies, and security selections.

Prior to forming Winthrop Capital Management, Mr. Hahn was the Chief Investment Officer and Senior Portfolio Manager for Oppenheimer Asset Management and its subsidiary, Oppenheimer Investment Management.

There he was responsible for the oversight of the fixed-income investment process.

He also served as the Chief Investment Officer and Senior Portfolio Manager with Conseco Capital Management (40|86 Advisors). In addition to his investment management responsibilities at CCM, Mr. Hahn was President and Trustee of the 40|86 Series Trust and the 40|86 Strategic Income Fund, and had responsibility for the $1.2 billion real estate and private equity portfolio.

Mr. Hahn holds a BBA from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from Indiana University.

He is a Chartered Financial Analyst, a member and former President of the CFA Society of Indianapolis, a former Trustee of the Indiana Public Employee Retirement System, and has served as a member on the ACLI’s Committee on State Regulation of Investments.

He also serves as an independent trustee of the FEG Absolute Access Fund, LLC, and is a member of the National Federation of Municipal Analysts.

The Winthrop success story is one that comes with many years of hard won stock picking experience.

It’s not a glamorous story. I was working at Oppenheimer, and separated from the company in June of 2007.

During the summer as I was interviewing for other jobs, I just wanted to try to find an organization with a healthy culture, do investment work and build the business.

But what happened was, all of a sudden, the job market went quiet.

So I set up Winthrop Capital Management really as a way to stay relevant and to stay in the investment business.

I did it without any capital, without any clients, without any employees, and without any track record.

By Valentine’s Day 2008, the financial crisis was bearing down on Wall Street, and ultimately 3,000 CIOs and heads of fixed income were put out on the street.

By that time I was well along the way of building Winthrop, so I was like, well, this is what I’m going to do.

Today we manage over $4 billion in assets. We have about 26 employees.

And we run both fixed-income and equity strategies for institutional clients.

It’s a walk in faith.

I’m very thankful for the business partners I’ve had along the way. It’s been 15 years now in building out the firm.”

Mr. Hahn and his portfolio management colleagues are big fans of large cap tech stocks.

“We emphasize large-cap stocks, so it’s investing in companies that have over $80 billion in market cap.

Our two favorite companies are Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), but we’ve had fairly large positions over the years in Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) as well…

Microsoft (MSFT) is an amazing company.

They shifted their business several years ago. It’s moved more into that software-as-a-service subscription model, so you have to buy your Windows subscription on an annual basis — you can’t go to the store and buy a diskette to update your operating system on your PC anymore.

So that’s part of the business.

Their Azure cloud business today, we look at it as one of the top three cloud businesses in the U.S. And we think their ability to compete globally, particularly in China, gives it an advantage.

And then, it’s really a large number of different businesses, but what they’ve done with the gaming business has been pretty solid.

Alphabet (GOOG) is another one of our favorites in the company.

Within Winthrop, we all have our own personal favorites. Microsoft (MSFT) would be mine.

Alphabet (GOOG) is Adam Coons’ — that’s really his number-one pick.

And I think Freddy Lavric would say the same thing — he’s one of our portfolio managers.

Alphabet (GOOG) is a business with the potential for strong revenue growth.

Its advertising revenue is extremely strong. Its cloud solution is also in the top five.

Really, their advertising revenue and the dominance in the search engine business is pretty solid.

The interesting thing is what they’ve been able to do with Fitbit and Nest.

We’re kind of waiting to see how they can further develop and grow that business, but they’ve got the ability to compete with Apple (AAPL) in a couple of areas.”

Get all the top picks from Gregory Hahn and his colleagues at Winthrop Capital by reading the entire 2,620 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.

Gregory J. Hahn, CFA, President & Chief Investment Officer, Winthrop Capital Management

email: ghahn@winthropcm.com