February 28, 2019
Dear WEALTHTRACK Subscriber,
Running your own business is the definition of a dream job for increasing numbers of Americans, particularly women. I had the opportunity to interview a panel of women business founders recently at the Women of Leadership Summit hosted by the New York affiliate of ACG, the Association for Corporate Growth.
1 Atelier’s Stephanie Sarka enables women to design their own luxury handbags. S’well’s Sarah Kauss created a reusable water bottle which became the original fashion hydration accessory and Paladin’s Felicity Conrad developed a software platform that transformed access to pro bono legal work.
ACG and the panelists gave us permission to share their visions, challenges, successes and mistakes with us. In the process they are helping all of us take charge of our own career destinies. The conversation will be available on wealthtrack.com.
When was the last time you thought of an investment as sleep insurance? During public television’s spring PLEDGE fund raising drive we are revisiting one of our most popular recent episodes, an interview with top-rated fund manager Mary Ellen Stanek, who runs the Baird Core Plus Bond Fund, which she proudly describes as “sleep insurance.”
During the last decade of record low interest rates, many investment firms chose an unconventional route, launching more than one hundred of what are called “unconstrained”, or as Morningstar categorizes them, non-traditional bond funds.
These funds have much more latitude than traditional bond funds, enabling them to invest in many different types of bonds, derivatives, currencies, some even invest in stocks and go short. As Morningstar notes “… in a large part, these funds have traded interest-rate risk for credit risk.” Morningstar also comments that “… the array of strategies employed by these funds means that the range of outcomes can be vast.”
These are exactly the characteristics that this week’s WEALTHTRACK guest is avoiding. She is a traditional bond fund manager to the core and proud of it.
Mary Ellen Stanek is Chief Investment Officer of Baird Advisors and President of the Baird Funds where she oversees more than $65 billion dollars in fixed income assets in addition to equity portfolios.
Since 2000 she, along with her long-time team has been Co-Founder and Co-Portfolio Manager of several Baird funds, including the flagship Baird Core Plus Fund which has a Morningstar Gold Medalist analyst rating. In nominating Core Plus as a finalist for 2016 Fixed-Income Fund Manager of the Year Morningstar noted the fund “… has delivered strong results in a risk-conscious and consistent way, tested by bouts of market stress.”
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview Stanek said “We’re not here to be exciting.” She’ll explain why on this week’s program.
March is women’s history month so you might be particularly interested in some research from Morningstar about how all-women bond fund teams have outperformed all-men managed ones by a significant margin over the past 15 years. Stanek will share her views on the topic in our online exclusive EXTRA feature.
Plus, a reminder that if you would like to take WEALTHTRACK with you on your commute or travels, you can now find the WEALTHTRACK podcast on TuneIn, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as iTunes and Spotify.
As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a great weekend and make the week ahead a profitable and productive one.
Best regards,
Consuelo
