Aoifinn Devitt: This bonus series is kindly supported by Soundmark Partners. Soundmark Partners LLC is a women-owned and led private credit firm focused on commercial real estate.
Apurva Schwartz: To actually be wary of somebody that has a good story to tell— storytelling, I think, is very dangerous in investing and can lead to all kinds of poor decisions. So for me, I think it’s making sure to look at things that others aren’t looking at, trying to avoid the herd. Don’t go to do something just because other groups of people are doing that thing. Don’t succumb to the fear of missing out, so chasing something that’s already worked. There’s, there’s a lot of that in this industry. And then avoiding extrapolation. So if something has gone badly, that doesn’t mean it will go badly in the future. And things that have gone up a lot may not go up a lot in the future.
Aoifinn Devitt: Sometimes we spend our working lives analyzing other funds and other organizations. We look at what works and what doesn’t. We look for red flags and we analyze their culture. What happens then when we want to find a home in one? Hear from our next guest how she turned her consulting background into a tool to choose her next home. I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Apurva Schwartz, who’s a portfolio specialist at Harding Lovener LP. She was previously a principal at Roccaton Investment Advisors, where she was a senior member of the investment team. Prior to that, she held a series of roles in equity analysis and investing. Welcome, Apurva. Thanks for joining me today.
Apurva Schwartz: Thank you for having me, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, you have an extensive resume with many chapters. Can you briefly walk us through where you grew up, what you studied, and how your path into investing took shape?
Apurva Schwartz: Yes, absolutely. I’m happy to. So I grew up outside of Boston and I went to school at the University of Michigan. So go blue for, for any of your listeners. And how I got my path into investing was actually quite accidental. I didn’t set out to be an investor. By an accident, accidental twist of fate, I walked into the wrong interview and struck up a nice conversation with the person who was recruiting and managed to get a callback for a fundamental analyst position at a long-only fund in Chicago quite accidentally. And I didn’t know much about investing at the time but was intrigued by the people that I met at this firm. It was called Institutional Capital. I joined their team and pretty quickly realized the idea of researching companies was tremendously appealing. And at time I was covering companies in the energy space. It was quite fascinating, completely different from maybe what I had thought. I did that for several years, worked with some pretty senior analysts who had a very disciplined approach to investing. So I think got this idea of a process discipline pretty early on. And then like many young folks, caught the wanderlust, was lured by the appeal of the hedge fund world. So I joined Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge fund, where I did primarily the same thing, only extended my long-short stock picks, long stock picks to shorts. And then I eventually launched my own fund with somebody that I worked with at Citadel, and that was a tremendously exciting experience. One, because I think not that many folks get a chance to bet on themselves, and so I was intrigued by this opportunity to kind of start something of my own. But also, I was aware that clients that were investing in any of the portfolios that I myself was picking stocks for, they have a broad set of considerations, and I was intrigued by learning more about these considerations. So by launching my hedge fund, I was able to understand the fundraising and, and business development efforts that go into creating an asset management business. And it’s from there that I decided I actually wanted to broaden out my experience to include the idea of picking managers rather than picking stocks. And so that led me to investment consulting and manager research, where I spent 5 years looking at the public equity space So it’s a bit of a long arc. And when I decided to leave that, I was interested in going back to an asset management firm and having spent sort of 5 years vetting great asset managers, I had a pretty short list of places I wanted to go to. And happily, Harding Lovener, the firm I work for now, was looking for somebody with my background and experience. And so it was a pretty easy jump.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s hilarious about going into the wrong interview. What interview were you hoping to go into? What was your original intention?
Apurva Schwartz: I think it was a Deloitte interview and it was the room next door, but the door was closed. So I ended up walking into the public equity investment role somehow, quite by accident. I should probably call my director of research at the time to find out if he made the right hire or not.
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh, well, a happy accident by all accounts. The other point I wanted to ask about is it’s really interesting that you went from working in fund management yourself, as you said, betting on yourself, stock picking, to then selecting managers. What do you think doing it yourself first had taught you about your ability to use judgment to kind of separate wheat from chaff, so to speak, with managers. One thing I think I might have, from my own experience, have used is because I had set up my own fund of funds, I knew the intense, I suppose, work that went into setting up a fund and, you know, the potential for that to be distracting perhaps around the investment process.
Apurva Schwartz: It’s interesting because there’s so many different things that I think I did differently as a manager researcher with that. Stock picking background. So first and foremost, I looked at the portfolios and I think some manager researchers maybe have less familiarity with the investments themselves. And I think I could tell pretty early on when I looked at a collection of companies, you know, what it meant, what the sector exposures actually meant for the implicit tilts in the portfolio. You can use risk systems to be able to do that and, and have a report tell you that, but it’s a little bit different when you understand enough about different companies and how you value them to be able to then kind of look at a bottom-up portfolio and understand implicitly what’s under the hood there. So I do think looking at companies and understanding kind of the long-term investment thesis for companies in many ways was very resonant to the idea of picking managers. You still had to think about evaluating a team, a product, and you had to have a process by going about finding investments, right? So in the same way that you would go and hunt individual stocks, you have to have a process for vetting managers and understanding what the success factors were for any given investment firm. But what was different to me was on some level, the governance aspect, when you look at a good CEO or CFO or the C-suite that’s managing a company, that maybe even matters more at an asset management firm where the investment culture, the team, the incentives, the ownership structure all have a bearing on the investment outcome and success that you can have. In a portfolio. If folks don’t feel like they have the ability to identify mistakes, to improve themselves, if it’s a culture of fear or a culture that doesn’t have psychological safety, then that can create disincentives to pick the right types of companies for the long term.
Aoifinn Devitt: And so you spent time on the inside, you spent time on the outside looking in, and now you’re working with clients within a particular fund. What would you say are your core investment beliefs that, that you hold in terms of approaching the world of investing?
Apurva Schwartz: You know, it’s interesting. I would say first and foremost, for me, I think it’s always remembering that markets are inherently unpredictable. It’s maybe the only thing that we have in common as human beings in this industry. Nobody knows the future, but there’s a great deal of work that goes into making sure people feel like they can make an educated guess about the future. The truth is no one knows. Trying to time the market is a very poor strategy in my opinion and can be very dangerous to client outcomes. One of the things that I’m often asked is, what’s my near-term outlook on Europe? Or what will happen to oil prices next year? I can probably look at some supply and demand data and make an educated guess, but that’s probably about it. This idea that forecast accuracy is, is a bit of a myth. That’s true for me, it’s true for anybody in this space. And so if you think about, well, if, if any of that is true, how do you then achieve kind of excess returns or success? You need to find ways of being different from consensus. And so to me, that has always been something that’s stuck with me, to actually be wary of somebody that has a good story to tell. Storytelling, I think, is very dangerous in investing and can lead to all kinds of poor decisions. So for me, I think it’s making sure to look at things that others aren’t looking at, trying to avoid the herd. Don’t go to do something just because other groups of people are doing that thing. Don’t succumb to the fear of missing out. So chasing something that’s already worked, there’s, there’s a lot of that in this industry. And then avoiding extrapolation. So if something has gone badly, that doesn’t mean it will go badly in the future. And things that have gone up a lot may not go up a lot in the future. It’s being mindful of these different things in not only what I’m doing on behalf of Harding Lovner, an asset manager, but when I was actually looking at managers, I think these were all things that I had to tell myself, especially the storytelling part. That I think is a, a big issue.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s really interesting. So be alert around storytelling, the seductive appeal of that, and the narrative— attaching a narrative where there is none. And I’m really intrigued as well about your comments around predictions, because forecasting— I know that there at Harding Lovener, your founder, as well as other professionals have done some work. And I suppose even though we all know now, I suppose, that predictions are imperfect and are based on imperfect information, there’s still a compelling need for them and a compelling demand for them. And I’m not sure that’s ever going to change. And I wonder, does that desire for prediction and outlook just help the client and the inquirer put more, more facts, more opinion around an inherently uncertain situation? I feel like even though I myself know how worthless my predictions are, I feel we will always be asked to make them. So we should just use some evidence in there.
Apurva Schwartz: I think that you bring up a good point, which is that when clients speak with managers, oftentimes they’re speaking with managers as representatives of a certain asset class or a certain region. So for example, Harding Lovener manages non-US portfolios. We get quite a few questions on non-US equities, the trajectory of China, what’s going to happen with emerging markets. These are all reasonable questions to ask your manager in international markets or Chinese equities or emerging markets. So I think it’s important for folks to kind of separate the idea of market prognostication with information sharing about what they’re able to glean from, in our case, the bottom-up business of finding and selecting companies for investment in our client portfolios. While I don’t have to prognosticate about the direction of emerging markets, we cover plenty of emerging markets companies, and maybe some of them are saying similar things. And so what are the similar things that they’re you’re saying in case that’s an insight that would be helpful for clients to take away with them and combine with other insights that they get from other folks covering emerging markets. So I think it’s important to dissociate those two things, but you can still be a useful partner to clients by sharing what you know about markets. I think it’s important for us as investment practitioners to make sure that we maintain that clear separation and that we stay humble about what we know because new information comes to light all the time and changes our perspectives on things.
Aoifinn Devitt: We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor of this series, Sandmark Partners. I sat down with Jenna Gerstenlauer to talk about their private credit strategy. I asked about the status of real estate debt relative to equity.
Speaker C: In our debt position, we are lower in the capital stack as compared to the equity owner, meaning if the property is worth $100, we may end up lending $70 to this borrower, and then we’re at a lower last-dollar exposure in terms of deal risk. If the borrower defaults on their loan, we can take ownership of a property worth $100 for $70, an example. So if commercial real estate loses value due to a host of reasons, including rising interest rates like we have been experiencing for the last year and a half, or specific credit issues at a property, the debt investment can tolerate some loss of property value, whereas the equity owner immediately loses value. So really, in summary, the debt strategy has downside protection and can be thought of as more defensive than an equity strategy. And this is why many investors are focusing on debt as a compelling opportunity, not just in real estate, but in many financial sectors.
Aoifinn Devitt: And now back to the show. So you are a keen observer of the asset management industry. As I mentioned, you’ve seen it from many angles. From your vantage point today, what do you see as being some of the, the main trends? What’s on clients’ minds? How do you see the kind of active-passive divide emerging? Any comments on the sort of state of the industry?
Apurva Schwartz: Yeah, it’s interesting. We get so many different questions about— I think what’s been so surprising to me is the constant questioning about the role that equities play in client portfolios from an asset allocation standpoint, especially as rates have risen so precipitously in the last several months and over the course of the last year. I think asset allocators are very much looking at other sources of return across asset classes. And whereas maybe 5 or 6 years ago, the way to achieve your return objective was to invest in equities, now there are different things that folks can look to invest in on the fixed income side to be able to lock in, you know, a 5% return or 6% return. I think right now the questions that we’re being asked are, you know, what is the role that international equities play in a broader investment portfolio, especially with the United States kind of handily beating from a return perspective non-US markets. For me, I sort of take the opinion that direct strategic allocations to equities play an important role in client portfolios, but it is important to let equities be equities in my opinion. So if you they’re, know, contributing to an overall investment return objective at a holistic portfolio level, you can hedge that with other things in your portfolio. If you have something that’s return-seeking, let that thing be return-seeking. It may not work in every year, and that’s why that direct strategic allocation makes sense. It’s very, very difficult to time markets. So I would say it’s important for folks to recognize that not everything will work in any given year, but if you have a properly balanced portfolio over time, you should— that should stand you in good stead. And so it’s important to not sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater just because equities have been a difficult place to be for the last couple of years. That doesn’t mean that that will be extrapolated in the future. I do think equities can still play a good role in portfolios, and I still think active managers have a role to play. This idea of buying all the risks with being in a passive index, to me, if things become difficult in the markets, if you do have a recession, your chances of success are better with an active manager who may be able to pick and choose parts of the market that may not suffer quite as much as, as the broad market would in that scenario. So for me, I do believe that active management can still play a role, but things like market breadth and depth can be difficult times to be an active manager. So I think again, that long-term strategic investment time horizon can help there.
Aoifinn Devitt: And when it comes to the rumored demise of equities in favor of bonds, certainly as bond yields tick upwards, I saw that and we heard, thought everyone would be shifting into bonds and then equities again outperformed handily year to date. Anyway, even though bonds are decent relative to their history. Do you think that might have been slightly overblown or exaggerated too? The shift from equities to bonds?
Apurva Schwartz: It’s one of those circumstances where I don’t know if it has to be one or the other. This sort of forced polarity that can sometimes happen of if not this, then this. I think a balanced portfolio would have both and maybe you tactically shift to one versus the other on the margin, but I could see from an LDI perspective, the value of having fixed income, a portion of your portfolio in fixed income, that makes a lot of sense. But again, your return objective may be reached through having both equities as well as bonds. So for me, I just don’t see the merits or the value of debating one or the other when, quite frankly, most portfolios that are well-balanced should have exposures to either. Maybe that sounds like a bit of a hedgy answer, but to me, I, I don’t really think of it as if one than the other. I think If I were to put this in sort of the equity speak, it’s always, you know, the question we’re always getting is sort of US or international. I think it should be both. There are times where international markets will do better than US markets. In fact, in 2022 that happened and the United States was not the place to be despite many years of outperformance prior to that. So I think, you know, having a well-balanced portfolio with sort of chips on the table can over time earn you a return, but not everything works at once. There’s that very famous asset class quilt where you can see the market leadership in any given year just changes so drastically. So for me, it’s, it’s not one or the other.
Aoifinn Devitt: And given you spend time working with sector specialists as well as generalists who have multiple sectors under their belt, so to speak, any sectors in particular where you see that there are meaningful inefficiencies, there’s some really interesting work being done, or anything that excites you in particular on a sector? Spaces right now?
Apurva Schwartz: Well, it’s interesting. I think industrials is an area where, from a growth perspective, it’s perhaps not as typical of an area where you’d see growth investors gravitate to. This is a part of Harding Loeffner portfolios where we’ve found some pretty interesting growth investments over the course of the last several years, especially as parts of the technology sector became extremely expensive. We sort of had this belief that that what you pay for an investment should have some bearing on the return you can get from it. Not all growth investors feel this, but we do. So for us, as parts of the tech space became expensive in the run-up to 2020 and, and even beyond, the industrial space offered some interesting opportunities. And I think this is part of the market where you’re actually seeing earnings expand at a faster rate than even the tech space, at least in 2023, that’s been the case. So there’s something appealing about the shovel sellers to the gold diggers, if you will. So these are the components manufacturers, these are kind of widgets or smaller types of products that can find their way into broader applications that can be very useful. Not all growth has to be kind of the sexy momentum-oriented fast growth that you find. We’d find plenty of those companies too, but you can still find opportunities to make money in the types of things that are a little bit less flashy. And so I think industrials is an interesting area. Those shares have been somewhat overlooked in 2022 into 2023. So that could be an area. And then I think maybe I would be remiss if I didn’t actually comment on the momentum that is in the tech space at this 10 seconds with generative AI and the prospective commercial applications there. A lot of folks have gotten very excited about companies in that space, specifically, let’s call them 7 companies in the United States that seem to have generated a disproportionately large portion of the market return in the United States, at least. It’s quite funny to me, a number of the firms that we invest in on the non-US side have been using generative AI for a number of years. For us, generative AI is synthesis, not genesis. It is a set of algorithms that have been limited by programming and data. With minimal or zero capacity for creativity. So generative AI cannot create something that isn’t already present in its data in some form or another. That would be artificial general intelligence, AGI, and we’re not there yet. There’s not a theory or accepted framework for that as far as I know. So for me, that tells me that human innovation still has a role. And so for where I get excited about in the tech space is is actually seeing firms harness this AI capability in small ways as well as significant ways and to help improve their businesses. And there are a number of companies, including some of the industrial companies that I mentioned, where you’re seeing these applications already kind of be put to work and have been in place for some time.
Aoifinn Devitt: And your mention of human innovation is a good segue to a question on culture, because I know that this is not only a subject close to my heart, but also close to yours. And we’ve already chatted about this, but how important is culture to investment managers and what are the hallmarks of, you think, successful cultures?
Apurva Schwartz: That is, in my opinion, Aoifinn, it’s the central question when I think about evaluating investment management firms. When I did it professionally on behalf of clients and then for myself personally when I was trying to figure out where to land next, I think culture is critical to perpetuating an organization and it’s not static. And you and I have talked about this in the past. Culture is changing and evolving. So just because you have a good culture on one day doesn’t mean you’ll have a good culture the next day. It’s something that employees at a firm need to be committed to preserving and maintaining and perpetuating in order for it to be able to survive. It is, in my opinion, a living and breathing thing. So when I think about what defines gold culture, I can of course mention sort of the table stakes, if you will. So. A strong investment discipline, an identity, a firm, a proper alignment of incentives. To me, these are parts or related things that are related to culture, but every good investment manager will have these things. So what I’m after when I think about culture is really this idea of psychological safety. So if you think about investing as something that isn’t static, that is kind of always being applied to a changing market, you can’t have 100% success in that endeavor. You need to be able to have a place where investors can apply a well-structured set of rules to a set of companies to vet those companies for investment, and some of them may not work out. And what happens to those investors when they are faced with unraveling what didn’t work out about that subset of investments? They need to be able to look at the set of decisions that were made by them as individuals and be able to unpack that and understand where the investment went wrong. If it did go wrong, was there a process violation? What’s going to happen next time to ensure that the process violation doesn’t occur? So this idea of psychological safety at a firm is is so that folks can make this analysis about a set of outcomes and then figure out ways to prevent those mistakes from happening again in the future. And a firm that doesn’t have that environment of psychological safety where folks can either voice dissent or admit mistakes, in my mind, is an unsafe environment. For investors at that firm, but also clients invested in those strategies. So for me, I’m really looking for firms that have psychological safety and allow for this type of introspection and evolution of investment process.
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. And it’s interesting, as you were speaking there, I was thinking about the origins of you this, know, in operating theaters. And there’s a lot of discussion now around financial planning. We’ve had Brian Portnoy on this podcast talk about the kind of fundamental root question that many clients have is, am I going to be okay? You know, will I have enough and am I going to be okay? And that is really an existential question of survival in the financial sense. And if operating theaters may be about survival in the physical sense, going and trusting your money with an asset manager, there’s that element of survival. There are high stakes at that stage. And I think that, you know, knowing your team is a robust team with the safety that you mentioned to, to, to grow together, to learn from mistakes. And move forward. I’ve kind of begun to realize just how important that safety is.
Apurva Schwartz: Well, I I think, think you’re exactly right. And actually, in studying so many different investment management firms, unfortunately, I’ve borne witness to what happens when you don’t have it. And having seen the sheer destruction of client capital that often results from being in the hands of teams that have not thought that through is certainly enough deterrent for me. And I don’t think I could ostensibly exist at a place that didn’t have that effort at psychological safety and that type of culture of recognizing how important it is to collaborate and share opinions in service of getting at the truth of whether or not something is a good investment. And that is the only thing that you can do because again, there are no guarantees in this business.
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. And many of the blowups have come from cover-up behavior, and cover-up behavior shouldn’t be necessary if is safety to disclose. The cover-ups are rarely good news for the client at the other end or the patient. But just getting on that topic, just developing a little bit further to speak, because obviously we talk about interpersonal relations at a workplace with this podcast, focus a lot on underrepresented groups in finance. I want to ask you in particular about women. Have you seen— what grade, I suppose, would you give the industry in terms of female representation across the industry and maybe diversity in general?
Apurva Schwartz: Industry-wide, I’m D. I would like to see more senior women in leadership roles in finance. And I’d also like to see more women kind of enter finance and have that be a primary sort of consideration for them when they, when they think about entering the workforce. So if not D, certainly not much better. So I guess maybe that’s a bit of a negative view. Through my own trajectory, I’ve gone back to think about why I never considered finance in a role for myself and why I had to accidentally wander into the wrong interview room before I realized what an interesting field it was. I think it was because I didn’t do math or engineering. I didn’t go to business school and get a BBA, so I just sort of automatically assumed that the door was shut for me in that field. And for any kind of younger women listening, I So you take this as sort of a— let me fly the flag and say you don’t need to necessarily have that background in order to have a successful career in finance. In fact, I think firms that prioritize cognitive diversity would maybe value the fact that you might have studied history or political science or English or other fields as well and then eventually found your way way into finance. I learned a tremendous amount on the job, and there’s nothing that I do that, you know, a young woman without that financial background couldn’t do if she simply set her mind to it. So for me, I think the industry can do more. I think women can be kind of encouraged to think about it as a field to enter into even without that STEM background. And I’d like to see kind of more women rise up through the ranks because I think that provides the level of inspiration that folks like myself starting or hitting their stride in their careers to be able to strive for more.
Aoifinn Devitt: And just going back to some personal reflections now, so we spoke earlier about you having a career with many chapters. What would you say you’ve learned from any of the setbacks or challenges that were in there? Anything that you can share with us?
Apurva Schwartz: I think honesty about mistakes is really important. I mean that at a personal level as well as a professional level. Sometimes it’s a bit hard own up when you’ve made a mistake in something. Maybe not everyone can admit it to themselves that, yeah, I messed this up, I probably should have done a better job in X or Y or Z. So I think being able to be honest with myself about where I have erred is important, but also finding a group of colleagues that will help hold myself to account and help hold me to account is hugely important. I think this gets back at this idea of psychological safety. I’m able to make mistakes professionally without being worried that I’ll be let go for incompetence or some such thing, right? I think I can be a competent individual in my role, and there are things that I could always find to do better. Finding that honesty, surrounding yourself with folks that are honest with you about these things has been a huge part of my journey in the professional sphere. So I I would, would say maintaining that honesty and not papering over these things to borrow your phrase, is, is a big part of why I’ve been able to achieve any success.
Aoifinn Devitt: Very interesting. And then in terms of mentors or key people who had an influence on you, is there anyone that comes to mind there?
Apurva Schwartz: It’s interesting. One of the first pieces, pieces of advice I got was from an investor that I worked with very briefly. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly after I joined that firm. His name was Rob Lyon, and on a call he told me, you can learn something from everyone you meet. And I think that’s really stuck with me. I think it maybe goes hand in hand with the idea that investing is a humbling business. And so you need to stay humble. And part of that humility is recognizing that somebody, anybody that you meet in this business probably has something that I can learn and that they can teach me. So maybe on one level, I’d have to say everyone has influenced me along the way. But I actually do credit David Lubner and Simon Hallett with really helping me clarify how I think about investing, not simply because I’ve found myself at their firm, which was a very happy moment for me, but also because it is rare, I think, to find people with such a defined point of view on how to structure decision-making and build a team around optimal decision-making. David, as founder of Harding Lovner, I think I spoke with him for the first time about 10 years ago, and I had come on site to Harding Lovner to do some due diligence because we had a fair amount of mutual client assets. And this was the first time I’d heard anyone from Harding Lovner speak. And within about 5 minutes, he was on the phone. I was in his office and he was, he was on the phone. And within 5 minutes of him speaking, I knew I had to get closer to that talent. I mean, just, you know it when you see it. And then Simon Hallett followed with David, and then I sort of became a fangirl ever since. I think this idea of optimally structuring decision-making and then building a team to promote that collaboration of without consensus decision-making and individual decision-making autonomy is really the right way to think about decisions and every other construct. Will have problems like groupthink or consensus building, which I think leads to suboptimal investment outcomes over time. So for me, that perspective went a great deal towards influencing how I think about investing.
Aoifinn Devitt: And that may well be the piece of advice or a creed or motto that you want to share, but that’s usually my final question. Any one piece of advice, any words of wisdom that you can leave us Swiss?
Apurva Schwartz: Yeah, you know, I would say to young folks starting out in this business, keep at it, right? It’s a humbling business and it may feel like doors are shut, but I think that for anybody that truly wants to be in finance, there are ways that you can make it happen. And I think that diligence and consistency of effort is what actually matters more than being super smart about this one narrow thing. I think for any investment manager that I’ve met along the way that has achieved a level of success, it’s my observation that consistency of effort as opposed to kind of very specific intelligence in something has made the difference between kind of being involved and then actually achieving success in something. So I think, and I see that reflected even in how we do things here, but also other other firms that are successful as well. It’s the consistency and the discipline that matters, so I would say just keep at it.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Apurva. From the moment of that accidental interview to where you are today, certainly it seems like a serendipitous turn of events. I’ve always seen you as a student of our industry, not only a participant in it, and I think we couldn’t ask for a more careful or thoughtful one. So thank you for sharing your observations and insights here with us.
Apurva Schwartz: Thank you, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: This bonus series is kindly supported by Soundmark Partners. Soundmark Partners LLC is a women-owned and led private credit firm focused on commercial real estate.
Apurva Schwartz: To actually be wary of somebody that has a good story to tell— storytelling, I think, is very dangerous in investing and can lead to all kinds of poor decisions. So for me, I think it’s making sure to look at things that others aren’t looking at, trying to avoid the herd. Don’t go to do something just because other groups of people are doing that thing. Don’t succumb to the fear of missing out, so chasing something that’s already worked. There’s, there’s a lot of that in this industry. And then avoiding extrapolation. So if something has gone badly, that doesn’t mean it will go badly in the future. And things that have gone up a lot may not go up a lot in the future.
Aoifinn Devitt: Sometimes we spend our working lives analyzing other funds and other organizations. We look at what works and what doesn’t. We look for red flags and we analyze their culture. What happens then when we want to find a home in one? Hear from our next guest how she turned her consulting background into a tool to choose her next home. I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I’m joined today by Apurva Schwartz, who’s a portfolio specialist at Harding Lovener LP. She was previously a principal at Roccaton Investment Advisors, where she was a senior member of the investment team. Prior to that, she held a series of roles in equity analysis and investing. Welcome, Apurva. Thanks for joining me today.
Apurva Schwartz: Thank you for having me, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, you have an extensive resume with many chapters. Can you briefly walk us through where you grew up, what you studied, and how your path into investing took shape?
Apurva Schwartz: Yes, absolutely. I’m happy to. So I grew up outside of Boston and I went to school at the University of Michigan. So go blue for, for any of your listeners. And how I got my path into investing was actually quite accidental. I didn’t set out to be an investor. By an accident, accidental twist of fate, I walked into the wrong interview and struck up a nice conversation with the person who was recruiting and managed to get a callback for a fundamental analyst position at a long-only fund in Chicago quite accidentally. And I didn’t know much about investing at the time but was intrigued by the people that I met at this firm. It was called Institutional Capital. I joined their team and pretty quickly realized the idea of researching companies was tremendously appealing. And at time I was covering companies in the energy space. It was quite fascinating, completely different from maybe what I had thought. I did that for several years, worked with some pretty senior analysts who had a very disciplined approach to investing. So I think got this idea of a process discipline pretty early on. And then like many young folks, caught the wanderlust, was lured by the appeal of the hedge fund world. So I joined Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge fund, where I did primarily the same thing, only extended my long-short stock picks, long stock picks to shorts. And then I eventually launched my own fund with somebody that I worked with at Citadel, and that was a tremendously exciting experience. One, because I think not that many folks get a chance to bet on themselves, and so I was intrigued by this opportunity to kind of start something of my own. But also, I was aware that clients that were investing in any of the portfolios that I myself was picking stocks for, they have a broad set of considerations, and I was intrigued by learning more about these considerations. So by launching my hedge fund, I was able to understand the fundraising and, and business development efforts that go into creating an asset management business. And it’s from there that I decided I actually wanted to broaden out my experience to include the idea of picking managers rather than picking stocks. And so that led me to investment consulting and manager research, where I spent 5 years looking at the public equity space So it’s a bit of a long arc. And when I decided to leave that, I was interested in going back to an asset management firm and having spent sort of 5 years vetting great asset managers, I had a pretty short list of places I wanted to go to. And happily, Harding Lovener, the firm I work for now, was looking for somebody with my background and experience. And so it was a pretty easy jump.
Aoifinn Devitt: That’s hilarious about going into the wrong interview. What interview were you hoping to go into? What was your original intention?
Apurva Schwartz: I think it was a Deloitte interview and it was the room next door, but the door was closed. So I ended up walking into the public equity investment role somehow, quite by accident. I should probably call my director of research at the time to find out if he made the right hire or not.
Aoifinn Devitt: Oh, well, a happy accident by all accounts. The other point I wanted to ask about is it’s really interesting that you went from working in fund management yourself, as you said, betting on yourself, stock picking, to then selecting managers. What do you think doing it yourself first had taught you about your ability to use judgment to kind of separate wheat from chaff, so to speak, with managers. One thing I think I might have, from my own experience, have used is because I had set up my own fund of funds, I knew the intense, I suppose, work that went into setting up a fund and, you know, the potential for that to be distracting perhaps around the investment process.
Apurva Schwartz: It’s interesting because there’s so many different things that I think I did differently as a manager researcher with that. Stock picking background. So first and foremost, I looked at the portfolios and I think some manager researchers maybe have less familiarity with the investments themselves. And I think I could tell pretty early on when I looked at a collection of companies, you know, what it meant, what the sector exposures actually meant for the implicit tilts in the portfolio. You can use risk systems to be able to do that and, and have a report tell you that, but it’s a little bit different when you understand enough about different companies and how you value them to be able to then kind of look at a bottom-up portfolio and understand implicitly what’s under the hood there. So I do think looking at companies and understanding kind of the long-term investment thesis for companies in many ways was very resonant to the idea of picking managers. You still had to think about evaluating a team, a product, and you had to have a process by going about finding investments, right? So in the same way that you would go and hunt individual stocks, you have to have a process for vetting managers and understanding what the success factors were for any given investment firm. But what was different to me was on some level, the governance aspect, when you look at a good CEO or CFO or the C-suite that’s managing a company, that maybe even matters more at an asset management firm where the investment culture, the team, the incentives, the ownership structure all have a bearing on the investment outcome and success that you can have. In a portfolio. If folks don’t feel like they have the ability to identify mistakes, to improve themselves, if it’s a culture of fear or a culture that doesn’t have psychological safety, then that can create disincentives to pick the right types of companies for the long term.
Aoifinn Devitt: And so you spent time on the inside, you spent time on the outside looking in, and now you’re working with clients within a particular fund. What would you say are your core investment beliefs that, that you hold in terms of approaching the world of investing?
Apurva Schwartz: You know, it’s interesting. I would say first and foremost, for me, I think it’s always remembering that markets are inherently unpredictable. It’s maybe the only thing that we have in common as human beings in this industry. Nobody knows the future, but there’s a great deal of work that goes into making sure people feel like they can make an educated guess about the future. The truth is no one knows. Trying to time the market is a very poor strategy in my opinion and can be very dangerous to client outcomes. One of the things that I’m often asked is, what’s my near-term outlook on Europe? Or what will happen to oil prices next year? I can probably look at some supply and demand data and make an educated guess, but that’s probably about it. This idea that forecast accuracy is, is a bit of a myth. That’s true for me, it’s true for anybody in this space. And so if you think about, well, if, if any of that is true, how do you then achieve kind of excess returns or success? You need to find ways of being different from consensus. And so to me, that has always been something that’s stuck with me, to actually be wary of somebody that has a good story to tell. Storytelling, I think, is very dangerous in investing and can lead to all kinds of poor decisions. So for me, I think it’s making sure to look at things that others aren’t looking at, trying to avoid the herd. Don’t go to do something just because other groups of people are doing that thing. Don’t succumb to the fear of missing out. So chasing something that’s already worked, there’s, there’s a lot of that in this industry. And then avoiding extrapolation. So if something has gone badly, that doesn’t mean it will go badly in the future. And things that have gone up a lot may not go up a lot in the future. It’s being mindful of these different things in not only what I’m doing on behalf of Harding Lovner, an asset manager, but when I was actually looking at managers, I think these were all things that I had to tell myself, especially the storytelling part. That I think is a, a big issue.
Aoifinn Devitt: It’s really interesting. So be alert around storytelling, the seductive appeal of that, and the narrative— attaching a narrative where there is none. And I’m really intrigued as well about your comments around predictions, because forecasting— I know that there at Harding Lovener, your founder, as well as other professionals have done some work. And I suppose even though we all know now, I suppose, that predictions are imperfect and are based on imperfect information, there’s still a compelling need for them and a compelling demand for them. And I’m not sure that’s ever going to change. And I wonder, does that desire for prediction and outlook just help the client and the inquirer put more, more facts, more opinion around an inherently uncertain situation? I feel like even though I myself know how worthless my predictions are, I feel we will always be asked to make them. So we should just use some evidence in there.
Apurva Schwartz: I think that you bring up a good point, which is that when clients speak with managers, oftentimes they’re speaking with managers as representatives of a certain asset class or a certain region. So for example, Harding Lovener manages non-US portfolios. We get quite a few questions on non-US equities, the trajectory of China, what’s going to happen with emerging markets. These are all reasonable questions to ask your manager in international markets or Chinese equities or emerging markets. So I think it’s important for folks to kind of separate the idea of market prognostication with information sharing about what they’re able to glean from, in our case, the bottom-up business of finding and selecting companies for investment in our client portfolios. While I don’t have to prognosticate about the direction of emerging markets, we cover plenty of emerging markets companies, and maybe some of them are saying similar things. And so what are the similar things that they’re you’re saying in case that’s an insight that would be helpful for clients to take away with them and combine with other insights that they get from other folks covering emerging markets. So I think it’s important to dissociate those two things, but you can still be a useful partner to clients by sharing what you know about markets. I think it’s important for us as investment practitioners to make sure that we maintain that clear separation and that we stay humble about what we know because new information comes to light all the time and changes our perspectives on things.
Aoifinn Devitt: We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor of this series, Sandmark Partners. I sat down with Jenna Gerstenlauer to talk about their private credit strategy. I asked about the status of real estate debt relative to equity.
Speaker C: In our debt position, we are lower in the capital stack as compared to the equity owner, meaning if the property is worth $100, we may end up lending $70 to this borrower, and then we’re at a lower last-dollar exposure in terms of deal risk. If the borrower defaults on their loan, we can take ownership of a property worth $100 for $70, an example. So if commercial real estate loses value due to a host of reasons, including rising interest rates like we have been experiencing for the last year and a half, or specific credit issues at a property, the debt investment can tolerate some loss of property value, whereas the equity owner immediately loses value. So really, in summary, the debt strategy has downside protection and can be thought of as more defensive than an equity strategy. And this is why many investors are focusing on debt as a compelling opportunity, not just in real estate, but in many financial sectors.
Aoifinn Devitt: And now back to the show. So you are a keen observer of the asset management industry. As I mentioned, you’ve seen it from many angles. From your vantage point today, what do you see as being some of the, the main trends? What’s on clients’ minds? How do you see the kind of active-passive divide emerging? Any comments on the sort of state of the industry?
Apurva Schwartz: Yeah, it’s interesting. We get so many different questions about— I think what’s been so surprising to me is the constant questioning about the role that equities play in client portfolios from an asset allocation standpoint, especially as rates have risen so precipitously in the last several months and over the course of the last year. I think asset allocators are very much looking at other sources of return across asset classes. And whereas maybe 5 or 6 years ago, the way to achieve your return objective was to invest in equities, now there are different things that folks can look to invest in on the fixed income side to be able to lock in, you know, a 5% return or 6% return. I think right now the questions that we’re being asked are, you know, what is the role that international equities play in a broader investment portfolio, especially with the United States kind of handily beating from a return perspective non-US markets. For me, I sort of take the opinion that direct strategic allocations to equities play an important role in client portfolios, but it is important to let equities be equities in my opinion. So if you they’re, know, contributing to an overall investment return objective at a holistic portfolio level, you can hedge that with other things in your portfolio. If you have something that’s return-seeking, let that thing be return-seeking. It may not work in every year, and that’s why that direct strategic allocation makes sense. It’s very, very difficult to time markets. So I would say it’s important for folks to recognize that not everything will work in any given year, but if you have a properly balanced portfolio over time, you should— that should stand you in good stead. And so it’s important to not sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater just because equities have been a difficult place to be for the last couple of years. That doesn’t mean that that will be extrapolated in the future. I do think equities can still play a good role in portfolios, and I still think active managers have a role to play. This idea of buying all the risks with being in a passive index, to me, if things become difficult in the markets, if you do have a recession, your chances of success are better with an active manager who may be able to pick and choose parts of the market that may not suffer quite as much as, as the broad market would in that scenario. So for me, I do believe that active management can still play a role, but things like market breadth and depth can be difficult times to be an active manager. So I think again, that long-term strategic investment time horizon can help there.
Aoifinn Devitt: And when it comes to the rumored demise of equities in favor of bonds, certainly as bond yields tick upwards, I saw that and we heard, thought everyone would be shifting into bonds and then equities again outperformed handily year to date. Anyway, even though bonds are decent relative to their history. Do you think that might have been slightly overblown or exaggerated too? The shift from equities to bonds?
Apurva Schwartz: It’s one of those circumstances where I don’t know if it has to be one or the other. This sort of forced polarity that can sometimes happen of if not this, then this. I think a balanced portfolio would have both and maybe you tactically shift to one versus the other on the margin, but I could see from an LDI perspective, the value of having fixed income, a portion of your portfolio in fixed income, that makes a lot of sense. But again, your return objective may be reached through having both equities as well as bonds. So for me, I just don’t see the merits or the value of debating one or the other when, quite frankly, most portfolios that are well-balanced should have exposures to either. Maybe that sounds like a bit of a hedgy answer, but to me, I, I don’t really think of it as if one than the other. I think If I were to put this in sort of the equity speak, it’s always, you know, the question we’re always getting is sort of US or international. I think it should be both. There are times where international markets will do better than US markets. In fact, in 2022 that happened and the United States was not the place to be despite many years of outperformance prior to that. So I think, you know, having a well-balanced portfolio with sort of chips on the table can over time earn you a return, but not everything works at once. There’s that very famous asset class quilt where you can see the market leadership in any given year just changes so drastically. So for me, it’s, it’s not one or the other.
Aoifinn Devitt: And given you spend time working with sector specialists as well as generalists who have multiple sectors under their belt, so to speak, any sectors in particular where you see that there are meaningful inefficiencies, there’s some really interesting work being done, or anything that excites you in particular on a sector? Spaces right now?
Apurva Schwartz: Well, it’s interesting. I think industrials is an area where, from a growth perspective, it’s perhaps not as typical of an area where you’d see growth investors gravitate to. This is a part of Harding Loeffner portfolios where we’ve found some pretty interesting growth investments over the course of the last several years, especially as parts of the technology sector became extremely expensive. We sort of had this belief that that what you pay for an investment should have some bearing on the return you can get from it. Not all growth investors feel this, but we do. So for us, as parts of the tech space became expensive in the run-up to 2020 and, and even beyond, the industrial space offered some interesting opportunities. And I think this is part of the market where you’re actually seeing earnings expand at a faster rate than even the tech space, at least in 2023, that’s been the case. So there’s something appealing about the shovel sellers to the gold diggers, if you will. So these are the components manufacturers, these are kind of widgets or smaller types of products that can find their way into broader applications that can be very useful. Not all growth has to be kind of the sexy momentum-oriented fast growth that you find. We’d find plenty of those companies too, but you can still find opportunities to make money in the types of things that are a little bit less flashy. And so I think industrials is an interesting area. Those shares have been somewhat overlooked in 2022 into 2023. So that could be an area. And then I think maybe I would be remiss if I didn’t actually comment on the momentum that is in the tech space at this 10 seconds with generative AI and the prospective commercial applications there. A lot of folks have gotten very excited about companies in that space, specifically, let’s call them 7 companies in the United States that seem to have generated a disproportionately large portion of the market return in the United States, at least. It’s quite funny to me, a number of the firms that we invest in on the non-US side have been using generative AI for a number of years. For us, generative AI is synthesis, not genesis. It is a set of algorithms that have been limited by programming and data. With minimal or zero capacity for creativity. So generative AI cannot create something that isn’t already present in its data in some form or another. That would be artificial general intelligence, AGI, and we’re not there yet. There’s not a theory or accepted framework for that as far as I know. So for me, that tells me that human innovation still has a role. And so for where I get excited about in the tech space is is actually seeing firms harness this AI capability in small ways as well as significant ways and to help improve their businesses. And there are a number of companies, including some of the industrial companies that I mentioned, where you’re seeing these applications already kind of be put to work and have been in place for some time.
Aoifinn Devitt: And your mention of human innovation is a good segue to a question on culture, because I know that this is not only a subject close to my heart, but also close to yours. And we’ve already chatted about this, but how important is culture to investment managers and what are the hallmarks of, you think, successful cultures?
Apurva Schwartz: That is, in my opinion, Aoifinn, it’s the central question when I think about evaluating investment management firms. When I did it professionally on behalf of clients and then for myself personally when I was trying to figure out where to land next, I think culture is critical to perpetuating an organization and it’s not static. And you and I have talked about this in the past. Culture is changing and evolving. So just because you have a good culture on one day doesn’t mean you’ll have a good culture the next day. It’s something that employees at a firm need to be committed to preserving and maintaining and perpetuating in order for it to be able to survive. It is, in my opinion, a living and breathing thing. So when I think about what defines gold culture, I can of course mention sort of the table stakes, if you will. So. A strong investment discipline, an identity, a firm, a proper alignment of incentives. To me, these are parts or related things that are related to culture, but every good investment manager will have these things. So what I’m after when I think about culture is really this idea of psychological safety. So if you think about investing as something that isn’t static, that is kind of always being applied to a changing market, you can’t have 100% success in that endeavor. You need to be able to have a place where investors can apply a well-structured set of rules to a set of companies to vet those companies for investment, and some of them may not work out. And what happens to those investors when they are faced with unraveling what didn’t work out about that subset of investments? They need to be able to look at the set of decisions that were made by them as individuals and be able to unpack that and understand where the investment went wrong. If it did go wrong, was there a process violation? What’s going to happen next time to ensure that the process violation doesn’t occur? So this idea of psychological safety at a firm is is so that folks can make this analysis about a set of outcomes and then figure out ways to prevent those mistakes from happening again in the future. And a firm that doesn’t have that environment of psychological safety where folks can either voice dissent or admit mistakes, in my mind, is an unsafe environment. For investors at that firm, but also clients invested in those strategies. So for me, I’m really looking for firms that have psychological safety and allow for this type of introspection and evolution of investment process.
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. And it’s interesting, as you were speaking there, I was thinking about the origins of you this, know, in operating theaters. And there’s a lot of discussion now around financial planning. We’ve had Brian Portnoy on this podcast talk about the kind of fundamental root question that many clients have is, am I going to be okay? You know, will I have enough and am I going to be okay? And that is really an existential question of survival in the financial sense. And if operating theaters may be about survival in the physical sense, going and trusting your money with an asset manager, there’s that element of survival. There are high stakes at that stage. And I think that, you know, knowing your team is a robust team with the safety that you mentioned to, to, to grow together, to learn from mistakes. And move forward. I’ve kind of begun to realize just how important that safety is.
Apurva Schwartz: Well, I I think, think you’re exactly right. And actually, in studying so many different investment management firms, unfortunately, I’ve borne witness to what happens when you don’t have it. And having seen the sheer destruction of client capital that often results from being in the hands of teams that have not thought that through is certainly enough deterrent for me. And I don’t think I could ostensibly exist at a place that didn’t have that effort at psychological safety and that type of culture of recognizing how important it is to collaborate and share opinions in service of getting at the truth of whether or not something is a good investment. And that is the only thing that you can do because again, there are no guarantees in this business.
Aoifinn Devitt: Absolutely. And many of the blowups have come from cover-up behavior, and cover-up behavior shouldn’t be necessary if is safety to disclose. The cover-ups are rarely good news for the client at the other end or the patient. But just getting on that topic, just developing a little bit further to speak, because obviously we talk about interpersonal relations at a workplace with this podcast, focus a lot on underrepresented groups in finance. I want to ask you in particular about women. Have you seen— what grade, I suppose, would you give the industry in terms of female representation across the industry and maybe diversity in general?
Apurva Schwartz: Industry-wide, I’m D. I would like to see more senior women in leadership roles in finance. And I’d also like to see more women kind of enter finance and have that be a primary sort of consideration for them when they, when they think about entering the workforce. So if not D, certainly not much better. So I guess maybe that’s a bit of a negative view. Through my own trajectory, I’ve gone back to think about why I never considered finance in a role for myself and why I had to accidentally wander into the wrong interview room before I realized what an interesting field it was. I think it was because I didn’t do math or engineering. I didn’t go to business school and get a BBA, so I just sort of automatically assumed that the door was shut for me in that field. And for any kind of younger women listening, I So you take this as sort of a— let me fly the flag and say you don’t need to necessarily have that background in order to have a successful career in finance. In fact, I think firms that prioritize cognitive diversity would maybe value the fact that you might have studied history or political science or English or other fields as well and then eventually found your way way into finance. I learned a tremendous amount on the job, and there’s nothing that I do that, you know, a young woman without that financial background couldn’t do if she simply set her mind to it. So for me, I think the industry can do more. I think women can be kind of encouraged to think about it as a field to enter into even without that STEM background. And I’d like to see kind of more women rise up through the ranks because I think that provides the level of inspiration that folks like myself starting or hitting their stride in their careers to be able to strive for more.
Aoifinn Devitt: And just going back to some personal reflections now, so we spoke earlier about you having a career with many chapters. What would you say you’ve learned from any of the setbacks or challenges that were in there? Anything that you can share with us?
Apurva Schwartz: I think honesty about mistakes is really important. I mean that at a personal level as well as a professional level. Sometimes it’s a bit hard own up when you’ve made a mistake in something. Maybe not everyone can admit it to themselves that, yeah, I messed this up, I probably should have done a better job in X or Y or Z. So I think being able to be honest with myself about where I have erred is important, but also finding a group of colleagues that will help hold myself to account and help hold me to account is hugely important. I think this gets back at this idea of psychological safety. I’m able to make mistakes professionally without being worried that I’ll be let go for incompetence or some such thing, right? I think I can be a competent individual in my role, and there are things that I could always find to do better. Finding that honesty, surrounding yourself with folks that are honest with you about these things has been a huge part of my journey in the professional sphere. So I I would, would say maintaining that honesty and not papering over these things to borrow your phrase, is, is a big part of why I’ve been able to achieve any success.
Aoifinn Devitt: Very interesting. And then in terms of mentors or key people who had an influence on you, is there anyone that comes to mind there?
Apurva Schwartz: It’s interesting. One of the first pieces, pieces of advice I got was from an investor that I worked with very briefly. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly after I joined that firm. His name was Rob Lyon, and on a call he told me, you can learn something from everyone you meet. And I think that’s really stuck with me. I think it maybe goes hand in hand with the idea that investing is a humbling business. And so you need to stay humble. And part of that humility is recognizing that somebody, anybody that you meet in this business probably has something that I can learn and that they can teach me. So maybe on one level, I’d have to say everyone has influenced me along the way. But I actually do credit David Lubner and Simon Hallett with really helping me clarify how I think about investing, not simply because I’ve found myself at their firm, which was a very happy moment for me, but also because it is rare, I think, to find people with such a defined point of view on how to structure decision-making and build a team around optimal decision-making. David, as founder of Harding Lovner, I think I spoke with him for the first time about 10 years ago, and I had come on site to Harding Lovner to do some due diligence because we had a fair amount of mutual client assets. And this was the first time I’d heard anyone from Harding Lovner speak. And within about 5 minutes, he was on the phone. I was in his office and he was, he was on the phone. And within 5 minutes of him speaking, I knew I had to get closer to that talent. I mean, just, you know it when you see it. And then Simon Hallett followed with David, and then I sort of became a fangirl ever since. I think this idea of optimally structuring decision-making and then building a team to promote that collaboration of without consensus decision-making and individual decision-making autonomy is really the right way to think about decisions and every other construct. Will have problems like groupthink or consensus building, which I think leads to suboptimal investment outcomes over time. So for me, that perspective went a great deal towards influencing how I think about investing.
Aoifinn Devitt: And that may well be the piece of advice or a creed or motto that you want to share, but that’s usually my final question. Any one piece of advice, any words of wisdom that you can leave us Swiss?
Apurva Schwartz: Yeah, you know, I would say to young folks starting out in this business, keep at it, right? It’s a humbling business and it may feel like doors are shut, but I think that for anybody that truly wants to be in finance, there are ways that you can make it happen. And I think that diligence and consistency of effort is what actually matters more than being super smart about this one narrow thing. I think for any investment manager that I’ve met along the way that has achieved a level of success, it’s my observation that consistency of effort as opposed to kind of very specific intelligence in something has made the difference between kind of being involved and then actually achieving success in something. So I think, and I see that reflected even in how we do things here, but also other other firms that are successful as well. It’s the consistency and the discipline that matters, so I would say just keep at it.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much, Apurva. From the moment of that accidental interview to where you are today, certainly it seems like a serendipitous turn of events. I’ve always seen you as a student of our industry, not only a participant in it, and I think we couldn’t ask for a more careful or thoughtful one. So thank you for sharing your observations and insights here with us.
Apurva Schwartz: Thank you, Aoifinn.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors on their personal journeys, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
