The Gotham Gal and I have our assets spread across a number of asset classes and money managers and our allocations and managers have changed a fair bit over the years. We’ve seen a bunch of managers in action up close and personal.
Right now, my favorite money manager is an optical surgeon named Robert Freedland. Robert is 56 years old, he’s been managing his own investments for 42 years, and he’s been blogging and podcasting about stocks for the past seven years. I invest with Robert on Covestor (which in the spirit of full disclosure is a portfolio company of Union Square Ventures).
About a year ago, we put a modest but non-trivial amount of cash into a Covestor account. We only invest with model managers in risk tiers 1 and 2 to keep our capital at lower risk. There were about five or six model managers in those tiers at that time so I put the minimum on all of them. I would check each month and slowly I left most of the managers. But I kept putting more money with Robert. And he kept performing. Now we have close to half of our Covestor portfolio with Robert and I am thinking of giving him even more.
We are up about 11% on the money we’ve had with Robert in the past year. Since some of those funds went in a year ago, but most went in more recently, I suspect our annualized returns are closer to the 17% return he’s annualized since he started on Covestor.
I like that Robert has delivered excellent performance with an emphasis on value investing in highly liquid stocks. I like that he doesn’t short stocks and doesn’t own anything I don’t understand or recognize. I like the fact that he has a strategy and he sticks with it. And most of all, I like that he is investing his own capital as well as mine.
If you want to invest with Robert, you can. He has a $5,000 minimum and you’ll need to open a Covestor account to do it. This is not a recommendation to invest with Robert, but it is an acknowledgement that there are great investors out there who don’t work on Wall Street and that thanks to the Internet they can manage your money as well as their own money and that is a very good thing.
