Christopher P. O’Keefe, CFA, Managing Director, Logan Capital Management, Inc.
JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) are only three of the stocks discussed in detail in interviews with these highly experienced and successful portfolio managers.
Christopher P. O’Keefe, CFA, is a Managing Director of Logan Capital Management, Inc. and the Lead Portfolio Manager of both the Dividend Performers Strategy and the Dividend Performers Balanced Strategy.
Prior to joining the firm, he managed these strategies at Manulife Asset Management, where he was also the Lead Portfolio Manager.
Earlier, Mr. O’Keefe was an equity Portfolio Manager and Director of Research at Compu-Val Investments, and before that he held analyst positions at CoreStates Investment Advisers and First Pennsylvania Bank.
“Also, within banks, we own JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), it certainly has been a good long-term dividend growth stock with very good management, a strong balance sheet, the kind of durability within financials that you want to have for long periods of time.”
Peter Santoro, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, Invesco U.S. Dividend and Core Equities
Peter Santoro, CFA, is Chief Investment Officer for Invesco U.S. Dividend and Core Equities and a Senior Portfolio Manager for the U.S. Dividend products at Invesco.
He serves as the lead manager for Invesco’s U.S. Dividend strategies.
Mr. Santoro joined Invesco in 2021.
Prior to joining the firm, he was a Senior Portfolio Manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments on multiple equity strategies.
“One other stock I can highlight is software and technology products maker Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). We hadn’t owned Microsoft for a long time in this fund, but we found Microsoft to get much more attractive as the tech selloff happened last year.
Quite simply, we believe Microsoft has a great diversified portfolio of products at the forefront of emerging critical technology needs.
In addition to benefitting from a number of long-term secular growth tailwinds, Microsoft has an extremely strong balance sheet, healthy projected free cash flows, and a management team that remains committed to strong capital discipline and returns to shareholders.”
Fred Cummings, President and Founder of Elizabeth Park Capital Management.
Fred Cummings is the President and Founder of Elizabeth Park Capital Management.
He serves as Portfolio Manager for the privately held, alternative asset management firm focused on long/short equity, event-driven, and customized investment opportunities in the banking sector.
The firm supports community bank technology investment through a partnership with Strandview Capital and the Btech Consortium Fund.
The firm is the investment manager for the Mission Driven Bank Fund
Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) is a bank holding company formed in December 2019 as the result of the merger of BB&T and SunTrust Banks.
“The Mission Driven Bank Fund was an idea encouraged by the FDIC.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Truist (NYSE:TFC) got together to anchor the fund, issued a competitive RFP, and we were fortunate to be awarded as the investment adviser last quarter.
Our co-manager, Calvert Impact, is a blue-chip impact investor.
And currently, we’re in the process of finalizing the fund documents and marketing materials.
So we expect to initiate fundraising activities hopefully sometime in the first quarter.
Our target first close is $350 million and the fund could be as large as $1 billion.
The anchor and lead investors have great support toward the mission and have committed $135 million.
We will partner with Calvert Impact and Strategic Value Bank Partners, creating a world-class team.
Calvert has long-standing roots over many decades in impact investing and they’ve also been active in the MDI and CDFI space.
Strategic Value Bank Partners has expertise in working with CDFIs, investing in private banks, and they also bring operational expertise. We bring bank-specific private and public equity investing with a highly experienced and deep investment team.
We will invest in community development financial institutions and minority depository institutions.
Many of these institutions are smaller in size and historically have not had access to capital. The fund will be a means to give these institutions broader access to capital to help them grow their businesses.”
Although JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) would seem to be a buy based on current market turmoil, another very experienced portfolio manager, urged caution in his prescient 3,315 word interview from January of this year.
Doug Ramsey, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, The Leuthold Group
Doug Ramsey, CFA, is the Chief Investment Officer of The Leuthold Group and Co-Portfolio Manager of the Leuthold Core Investment Fund and the Leuthold Global Fund.
He also maintains the firm’s proprietary Major Trend Index.
He is also the lead writer for The Leuthold Group’s institutional research publications.
He also has been interviewed on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and by Barron’s. Earlier, he was Chief Investment Officer at Treis Capital.
“The Major Trend Index began to turn more cautious in late 2021, and formally sank into bear territory on January 21, 2022.
That was just a few weeks after the bull market high in the S&P 500 on January 3, 2022, and the MTI has remained bearish ever since.
The categories weighing on the MTI this year have been, one, the cyclical work, and within our cyclical work, anything related to monetary or liquidity conditions.
Second, the technical underpinnings have been poor.
A simple but useful mental model of the liquidity available for the stock market is the spread between money supply growth and nominal GDP.
We’ve seen an abrupt slowdown in M2 growth in 2022.
The latest report on M2 through the month of November showed it was flat versus 12 months ago. And it looks to me like when we get the final numbers for December of 2022, that we’ll have the first contraction in M2 on an annual basis in the modern history of those numbers, which goes back to 1959.
So, the monetary slowdown is one thing.
But in the face of that slowdown, the economy — despite consensus expectations of a U.S. recession in 2023 — the issue is that on a nominal basis, the economy is still too hot.
It looks to me like in the fourth quarter — and of course quarterly GDP estimates can be volatile — but it looks like we’ll have 2% to 3% real growth in the fourth quarter, plus 6 percentage points or 7 percentage points of inflation.
That means the nominal economy on a year-over-year basis is still growing almost double digits.
It’s probably 8% to 10% year over year in the fourth quarter, compared with money supply growth of zero.
There’s not enough money supply to fund this nominal expansion in the economy, and this is very often when stock market accidents happen — when we have this dearth of liquidity relative to the rate of economic growth.”
Get the complete picture of whether to invest in JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) and many other stocks by reading all of these interviews in full, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
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