Melody Prenner Bryant joined Gabelli Asset Management Company in 2018 as a Portfolio Manager and recently also joined the portfolio management team of the Gabelli ESG Fund in February 2019.
Ms. Bryant has almost 30 years of experience as a Portfolio Manager, having begun her career as a security analyst for Oppenheimer Capital Corp. She then joined John A. Levin & Co., Inc. as a security analyst and subsequently became a portfolio manager, Co-Chairman and a member of the board of directors of BKF Capital, a holding company for the asset management firm. She lives with her husband and five children in New York City.
Christina Alfandary rejoined Gabelli Asset Management Company in 2016 as Managing Director, Environmental, Social & Governance — ESG — and Sustainable Investments.
In her role, she leads the company’s expansion of its ESG integration efforts and ESG investing capabilities. Prior to rejoining, she was Senior Managing Director, Co-Head of Nikko Asset Management Americas, Inc. where she worked from 2005 to 2015.
A native of California, Ms. Alfandary received an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School and earned her B.A. from Lewis & Clark College.
In this 2,802 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript, these two top portfolio managers reveal a unique investment vision with specific examples.
“A second name is Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google. And here we have done a considerable amount of work, particularly because there are ESG concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy issues that have come to the front.
But we feel very confident after speaking to the management many times on these topics that they’re ring-fencing the business and they’re doing their best to comply with all requirements that the government is demanding. Their cybersecurity is extremely robust.
What’s interesting to us isn’t so much the plain-vanilla Google business, the search business, but rather the business that’s called “Other Bets.”
The Other Bets are a group of companies that Alphabet has invested in over time. And these collectively are losing money at the moment, but many of them represent really significant value and opportunity.”
Get the complete picture on this and several other top picks in this 2,802 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript.
David Corris, CFA, is Head of Disciplined Equities and Portfolio Manager, Disciplined Equities at BMO Global Asset Management. Mr. Corris heads the BMO Disciplined Equity Team and is responsible for equity portfolio management and research. He joined the company in 2008.
Mr. Corris began his investment management career in 1999 and was a quantitative equity portfolio manager/researcher at Northern Trust Global Investments and a quantitative equity research analyst at Citigroup Asset Management.
He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in mathematics and quantitative economics from the University of Wisconsin. In addition, he is a CFA charterholder and a member of the CFA Institute, the CFA Society of Chicago and the Chicago Quantitative Alliance.
In this 2,394 word interview, exclusively provided to the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Corris delivers some insights from his portfolio:
“One example of a lesser-known holding is Bright Horizons Family Solutions (NYSE:BFAM). They offer employer-sponsored child care. Their revenue growth has been in the high single digits, their earnings growth has been in the mid-double digits, and their business model is stable because employers would not cut off the child care benefit, even during a recession.
It’s also a business that tends to have longer-term contracts with employers and becomes a locked-in part of the employee benefit package, which again makes it a defensive holding.”
Another top pick further illustrates his investment philosophy:
“…Another example would be Waste Management (NYSE:WM). They are the largest public waste management company nationally. They’ve demonstrated that they can achieve mid-single-digit revenue growth with low-single-digit earnings growth in a consistent, organic manner.
They also have a stable business model, and while they’re technically considered an industrial company, in many ways, they behave as a utility. We view them as a fundamentally strong and highly stable business that will do well in all types of market environments, including a recession.”
Get the full detail on these and all the other top picks from David Corris, only in this exclusive 2,394 word interview, in this new issue of the Wall Street Transcript,
Erik Holmlin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bionano Genomics, Inc. (NASDAQ:BNGO), has more than two decades of experience developing innovative solutions and companies in the life sciences and health care industries.
His experience includes positions at GenVault Corporation as CEO, Exiqon A/S as CCO and Becton Dickinson as Vice President of Marketing and Development.
In 2001, Dr. Holmlin led the formation and financing efforts of GeneOhm Sciences, Inc. and orchestrated the company’s acquisition by Becton Dickinson in 2006. He also served as an entrepreneur in residence — EIR — at leading life-science venture capital firm Domain Associates, LLC. Dr. Holmlin was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena — Caltech.
He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech and MBAs from UC Berkeley and Columbia University.
In his exclusive 1,777 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Holmlin describes the upside for his company:
“The opportunity that is in front of Bionano and the Saphyr is made possible because while traditional/commercial sequencers are incredibly robust — Illumina is an example of a sequencing company — those sequencers are able to analyze some types of genomic variation but not all types, and the Saphyr system analyzes the types of genomic variation that sequencers don’t.
The types that we analyze are called structural variations, and they involve a change in structure of the genome as opposed to a change in its sequence.”
This proprietary platform technology enables genetic sequencing not covered by the Ilumina product line:
“But in the middle, there’s a whole class of variation called structural variation, and sequencers are essentially blind to those because they don’t so much involve a change in sequence, but rather, they involve a change in genome structure, the location of the sequence on a particular chromosome.
Now, structural variations are very important in cancer, for example. Ninety percent of blood cancers are caused by a structural variation, and yet sequencers cannot detect those.
So we built the Saphyr to be a structural variation detector. It’s based on direct imaging of the chromosomal fragments that are contained in the cells, and that imaging reveals certain patterns that in turn we’re able to read and interpret and, therefore, determine the structure of the genome.
What’s unique about us is that we can see structure, but we cannot see point mutations, and it’s the inverse for sequencers. For example, the sequencers that Illumina sells can see point mutations but not structure. So we are a very perfect complement to sequencers out in the field.”
Read the entire 1,777 word interview with Dr. Holmlin, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
David Corris, CFA, is Head of Disciplined Equities and Portfolio Manager, Disciplined Equities at BMO Global Asset Management.
Mr. Corris heads the BMO Disciplined Equity Team and is responsible for equity portfolio management and research. He joined the company in 2008. Mr. Corris began his investment management career in 1999 and was a quantitative equity portfolio manager/researcher at Northern Trust Global Investments and a quantitative equity research analyst at Citigroup Asset Management.
He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in mathematics and quantitative economics from the University of Wisconsin.
In his exclusive 2,394 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Corris reveals the secret to his market beating equity investment returns.
“We see that volatility has been rising slightly in the last few months, and we expect there to be elevated levels of volatility going forward.
We think the drivers of that volatility include a market near all-time highs, an economic recovery that many people think is nearing late cycle, increased political volatility, especially as we lead up to the elections, and volatility potentially from Federal Reserve policy and interest rate changes.
All of those conditions could lead to more volatility going forward.”
One example for a safe haven in this rising volatility environment is an auto parts supplier:
“One example of a company that we own is AutoZone (NYSE:AZO). The majority of AutoZone’s business is reselling auto parts directly to consumers.
They are a stable company that has consistently outperformed their estimates, and their business model helps explain why we think they’re low risk. Their business of selling to consumers is fairly stable because there’s always demand for auto parts replacements.
And in some ways, it can be countercyclical, because when the economy has a downturn, consumers may choose to buy fewer new cars and instead service their existing cars.”
Get all the other methods being employed by this expert professionals portfolio management in the entire exclusive 2,394 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
Melody Prenner Bryant joined Gabelli Asset Management Company in 2018 as a Portfolio Manager and recently also joined the portfolio management team of the Gabelli ESG Fund in February 2019.
Ms. Bryant has almost 30 years of experience as a Portfolio Manager, having begun her career as a security analyst for Oppenheimer Capital Corp.
She then joined John A. Levin & Co., Inc. as a security analyst and subsequently became a portfolio manager, Co-Chairman and a member of the board of directors of BKF Capital, a holding company for the asset management firm.
Christina Alfandary rejoined Gabelli Asset Management Company in 2016 as Managing Director, Environmental, Social & Governance — ESG — and Sustainable Investments. In her role, she leads the company’s expansion of its ESG integration efforts and ESG investing capabilities.
Prior to rejoining, she was Senior Managing Director, Co-Head of Nikko Asset Management Americas, Inc. where she worked from 2005 to 2015. While there, she managed the U.S. business and was instrumental in a U.S. product launch of an innovative impact investing Green Bond product developed in collaboration with the World Bank.
In this 2,802 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, these top professionals reveal the strategy for finding top picks they use.
“…the Gabelli ESG Fund tends to follow our investment process of “private market value with a catalyst.” It does tend to be a little bit more on the value side.
Essentially, we’re looking for companies that are strong players in their particular industry, but specifically, for this fund, that are trading essentially at a discount to what we have calculated to be their intrinsic value.”
“…a number of large food companies, particularly some well-known names in Europe, like Danone (OTCMKTS:DANOY) and even Nestle (OTCMKTS:NSRGY), are focusing and shifting their product portfolios to take advantage of some of those trends.
So in looking at a company like Danone, its own strategy and mission is “One Planet. One Health.” That mission cuts across a number of fronts.
So they were the most well-known yogurt maker probably 10 years ago, when yogurt was becoming the alternative healthy snack. Since then, they’ve expanded their healthy product portfolio by purchasing a company called Happy Family in 2013, which was a U.S.-based maker of organic baby food.
And then more recently, in 2017, they purchased a company called WhiteWave, which is the maker of Silk almond milk. And they make a lot of other plant-based protein beverages to meet demand for plant-based protein beverages and now meat as well.
But the plant-based protein beverages, coconut milk, almond milk and things like that have really grown quite dramatically.”
Get the full detail in this exclusive 2,802 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
Mark Madsen, CFA, is a Portfolio Manager and Senior Research Analyst at Grandeur Peak Global Advisors. He works on the Grandeur Peak Global Reach Fund (MUTF:GPROX), Grandeur Peak International Opportunities Fund (MUTF:GPIOX) and Grandeur Peak Global Contrarian Fund (MUTF:GPGCX).
He is also a senior research analyst with a specialty focus on the industrials, energy and materials sectors globally.
Keefer Babbitt, CFA, is a Portfolio Manager and Senior Research Analyst at Grandeur Peak Global Advisors. He works on the Grandeur Peak Global Contrarian Fund (MUTF:GPGCX) and the Grandeur Peak Global Reach Fund (MUTF:GPROX).
He is a senior research analyst with a specialty focus on energy and materials and industrials industry team.
Dane Nielson is a Research Analyst at Grandeur Peak Global Advisors. Mr. Nielson is a global research analyst covering Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.
He is also Lead Analyst on the Grandeur Peak Global Contrarian Fund (MUTF:GPGCX).
In this exclusive 3,439 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript, these 3 highly experienced professional money managers reveal their investing process and detail their top picks.
“…We’re looking for companies that are small and under the radar. They’re really well-managed companies, but they’re tiny in terms of market cap.
A lot of people don’t spend a lot of time looking at them on the active side because you can’t put a ton of assets into them. And then, passive investing doesn’t really want to own these either because there’s not a lot of liquidity typically.
And again, since they’re small on the microcap side, they don’t make it into the index in a meaningful way most of the time.
One name that we really like right now is called BBI Life Sciences (HKG:1035). This is what we call an undiscovered gem, best-in-class growth company. ”
The research team has high hopes for this stock as well as all their top picks:
“If you look around the world, there are a lot of companies that look like BBI in terms of how they’ve matured and grown. A couple of them would be Thermo Fisher (NYSE:TMO) and Sigma-Aldrich, which are two of the peers that we compare them to. You want a good product, and you want a wide distribution network.
And what BBI has built out is a 400-person team and a direct sales force in China.”
To get the full detail on this and all the other top pickes from the team interview, read the entire 3,439 word interview only in the Wall Street Transcript.
Difei Yang, Ph.D., is Managing Director of Equity Research at Mizuho Americas, Research Division. Dr. Yang has been covering the biotech and pharma sector for nearly a decade, most recently as Managing Director at Aegis Capital. She also worked in senior equity analyst roles at Brean Capital, R.F. Lafferty, WallachBeth Capital and Auriga Global Investors.
In addition, she has held senior science, program management and business development roles within the pharmaceutical industry and has authored many granted U.S. patents and peer-reviewed scientific publications.
She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from UCLA, as well as an MBA from Georgia State University and a B.S. degree in physics from Peking University, China.
In this 2,716 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Difei Yang explores the potential of several publicly traded biotech firms to be acquired by larger multinational pharmeceutical corporations.
One theme is the rapidly growing gene therapy biotech sector:
“Gene therapy is typically used to treat inherited rare diseases, and it usually involves single gene mutations. The first gene therapy that was approved in the U.S. is called Luxturna.
It is a gene therapy developed by a company called Spark Therapeutics (NASDAQ:ONCE). That’s a company we cover, and the drug is used to treat an inherited retinal disease, so a form of blindness. And earlier this year, Roche (OTCMKTS:RHHBY) offered to buy Spark Therapeutics for a substantial premium.”
Dr. Yang identifies the attributes that make for a good candidate for acquisition in the space:
“A few common themes we’re observing in that space is that, number one, we tend to see the highest probability of success for those companies where they target a single gene mutation, and secondarily, when these companies are vertically integrated, they’re able to control the manufacturing and basically make products to support clinical development as well as commercialization.”
One company that fits the bill, according to Dr. Yang:
“So we cover a company called Audentes Therapeutics (NASDAQ:BOLD). They have a therapy that is currently in late-stage development treating X-linked myotubular myopathy — XLMTM — an inherited form of a neuromuscular disorder.
These patients are typically diagnosed when they are babies.
The disease involves severe muscle weakness, so not only do these babies not reach developmental milestones, they probably never acquired the skills to walk.
Muscle weakness also impacts their lung function. And the result usually leads to babies not being able to breathe on their own and require ventilators for support, in some cases 24 hours per day.
Audentes Therapeutics has a gene therapy. And based on early clinical data, what we’re seeing is that not only the babies are alive, they started getting off ventilator support. That is a drastic improvement in the standard of care.”
Read the entire 2,716 word interview to get the full details on this stock pick and many others, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
Mark Watson is Managing Director of the Boston Impact Initiative Fund, which offers blended capital to address the racial wealth gap in eastern Massachusetts.
He is also the Founder of Keel Asset Management LLC, a financial advisory firm that provides socially responsible financial planning and investment advisory services to nonprofits, public and corporation pension plans. He is also an investment committee member of the Fair Food Fund; Chair of the Triskeles Foundation’s asset management committee; Board President of Sustainable Cape, Inc.; and a former board member of the Social Venture Network.
In this 3,690 word interview, Mr. Watson discusses his unique investment strategy, exclusively for the Wall Street Transcript.
“The fund’s operation sits inside of a 501(c)(3), whose mission is poverty elevation broadly speaking, and the fund sells notes to investors through the range of notes.
Those notes essentially raise debt from both accredited and nonaccredited investors and philanthropists. Those stakeholders can be high net worth folks. It could be family offices. It could be donor-advised funds. It could be individual investors.
For example, it could be local churches or faith-based organizations who have different terms that allow us to mix the incoming proceeds in a variety of ways to match the deployment that’s required by the entities that we’re investing in. So all that we owe back to investors is their principal and some interest. So that’s one distinction.
The second distinction is any upside accrues to the fund and will be recycled for reinvestment. The purpose of the fund is to regenerate community wealth, not extract wealth from them.
So any of the upside that accrues from, let’s say, we invest in a business that gets purchased by a third party, the upside accrues back to the nonprofit and then gets recycled back through the deployment process.
I have worked in traditional investments for more than 20 years. Some investors are looking for market-rate returns, which can be extractive from the same neighborhood that we’re actually trying to reinvest in.
So our focus is to deploy capital in a way that rebuilds assets, building strength in communities.”
One example has already gained significant traction:
“A second business in which we made an investment is a food business that I believe will be one of the nation’s newest nut-free consumer brands, called 88 Acres, which again went from zero revenues, now has a plant in Dorchester, Massachusetts, hired from the community offering living wages and is now selling product nationally through Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Whole Foods, Costco (NASDAQ:COST) and Target (NYSE:TGT) as well as public schools, and should be close to $13 million run rate on an annualized basis at the end of this year. They started with us at zero.
There are a number of exciting opportunities that are big like that.”
To get all the detail on this innovative fund, read the entire 3,690 word exclusive interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
Pedro Marcal is the Director of International Equities and a Portfolio Manager at Foresters Investment Management Company, Inc. — FIMCO — and joined the firm in May 2018. Previously, he was a portfolio manager of global and international products at Fred Alger Management, where he worked for more than five years.
Before that he was a portfolio manager at Allianz Global Investors and its predecessor, Nicholas‐Applegate Capital Management, for 18 years, where he focused on international equities including developed and emerging markets. He has been in the investment management industry since 1994.
He has a B.A. in economics from the University of California at San Diego and an MBA from UCLA.
In this 2,668 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Marcal demonstrates how ESG investing can produce outsized returns for investors.
“We’re talking about sustainability and particularly sustainability with a focus on companies that do the least damage to the environment while providing products and services that face increasing demand, such as food production and lower-emission air conditioning and resource utilization. And I think investors are increasingly interested in ESG.
We own another company, called Ashtead (OTCMKTS:ASHTF), that might be considered controversial in terms of being an ESG-friendly company, but we don’t think so. Ashtead is a British company that leases a full range of construction, industrial and general equipment to customers.”
Another interesting pick is the famous Japanese video game company.
“The key here is that we think Nintendo will launch a less expensive Switch. It was a little Nintendo machine that people play Donkey Kong on.
So this DS hand-held replacement has the potential to triple the Street forecast for hardware units. And this is supported by sales of their DS, which has done 230 million units in all of its versions since launch in 2004. So unlike the DS, the Switch addresses both the at-home and mobile hand-held markets.
We met with Nintendo’s senior management and played their yet-to-be-released games at the E3 Conference in June, and the lines were hours long to play some of these games.
Our target price is significantly above our 20% threshold. Perhaps more importantly for us, being long-term investors, we look at our three-year target price and see significantly more upside. ”
To get more detail on these and several other ESG stocks owned in this highly respected stock picker’s portfolio, read the entire 2,668 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
Brett P. Monia, Ph.D., is a Founding Member of Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he is currently the Chief Operating Officer. He will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer of Ionis in January 2020. Dr. Monia has extensive experience across a range of therapeutic areas, including oncology, metabolic disease, inflammation, neurological disease and cardiovascular disease, which have resulted in a broad range of successful clinical achievements and in marketing approvals for new medicines.
As Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Monia leads business, regulatory and human resource functions, as well as translational medicine. He has published more than 200 primary research manuscripts, reviews and book chapters, and he is an inventor on more than 100 issued patents.
He is a senior editor for the Journal of Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, on the board of directors for Dynacure and has been President of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society. Dr. Monia is also an adjunct professor of biology at San Diego State University. He received his Ph.D. in pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania and B.S. degrees in molecular biology and analytical chemistry at Stockton State College in Pomona, New Jersey.
In this 3,481 word interview, exclusively to the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Monia demonstrates the upside for investors in his company:
“…Our pipeline of more than 40 medicines in development, spanning from early development to the very final stages of clinical trials before potential commercialization, is really exciting. We have drugs for all kinds of diseases that have had no treatment options available for them.
Most of them are lethal diseases; oftentimes, they are genetic diseases. And they are not just rare diseases, like the three products I just highlighted, but they’re also for many common broad populations as well. And maybe I’ll just highlight a couple of them for you.
We have a program that’s now in Phase III clinical trials that’s targeting the cause of Huntington’s disease, a genetic neurodegenerative disease that is handed down from generation to generation. We’ve known the cause of this disease for more than 30 years, but it wasn’t until a new drug platform came forward, like antisense, that allowed us to target the cause of this disease and show that we can inhibit the production of this disease-causing molecule, the protein.
This drug is now in Phase III clinical trials with our partner Roche with data expected out maybe in 2022.
Another neurodegenerative disease, a genetic disease, for the treatment of a form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, has shown strong evidence of …”
Get the complete picture of the upside for investors by reading the entire 3,481 word interview, only in the Wall Street Transcript.
