CFA Society Minnesota Member Spotlight

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Nathan Erickson, CFA, CAIA
Senior Vice President/ Client Portfolio Manager
Bell Institutional Investment Management

Nathan Erickson, CFA, CAIA

For a client-facing portfolio manager who enjoys serving his Bell Institutional Investment Management clients through both relationships and analysis, Nathan Erickson, CFA, CAIA, has a remarkably good setup to socially distance during a pandemic. After a quick, ten-minute commute to his office at Bell Bank in downtown Fargo, North Dakota, Nathan can take a back stairwell up to his office and only encounter two to three other people. On other days, he can work from home depending on what’s on his schedule.

As Senior Vice President/Client Portfolio Manager, Nathan meets with the boards and investment committees of endowments, foundations and retirement plans to properly understand their goals, effectively manage their investment portfolios and consult on their Investment Policy Statements. Nathan also chairs Bell’s Fund Committee, which selects investments and monitors capabilities for institutional clients and directs investment recommendations for wealth management clients. Additionally, he oversees the research for alternative investments and ESG portfolios.

Impact of COVID-19

COVID-19 has forced a number of adaptations in all aspects of life and work for people across the globe. Yet it hasn’t slowed the speed of business, especially in the investment industry.

Nathan remembers the third week in March when “everything became real” and Bell Bank sent home everyone who had the ability to work remotely.

“I went home immediately and worked only from home for three months solid,” he said.

In June, Bell Bank began a return-to-work approach based on personal choice.

“Lately, client meetings have been a mix of videoconference and in-person, depending on the preference of the organization I am meeting with,” he says. “In-person meetings are still different, however, with bigger rooms for social distancing and masks in some cases.”

A big move

A native of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Nathan made very big decisions after high school. He pursued his education, becoming the first member of his immediate family to receive a bachelor’s degree or higher. He fell in love and married his wife, Jeanette, just ahead of their senior year in college. Together, they chose to move “somewhere warm” and selected Arizona after his wife was offered a teaching position in downtown Phoenix.

Nathan and Jeanette had no friends or family in Phoenix, but they fearlessly packed everything up and made a big move that lasted eight years.

Shortly after arriving in Arizona, Nathan started as a financial advisor at a comprehensive financial planning firm focusing on medical professionals. Later he had the opportunity to move over to Vanguard as a relationship manager in the firm’s High Net Worth department. 

Path to becoming a CFA charterholder

Nathan originally planned to pursue the CFP credential because he hadn’t been as exposed to the CFA. Once he learned about the CFA, he knew “it was the track I wanted to go down.” He enrolled in the CFA program and transitioned within Vanguard to become an investment strategist for retirement plans.

After signing up for his first test, Nathan found out his wife was pregnant with their first child. He embraced his new role of helping to take care of a baby while soldiering forward with his studies, partnering with other professionals in a Vanguard CFA study group and networking with others studying at CFA Society Phoenix events.

As Nathan’s first child continued to grow and the Ericksons were blessed with two more children, they decided to “raise their kids in four seasons” and gift them with proximity to cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles in the Upper Midwest.

CFA Society Minnesota to the rescue

Nathan credits Tom Crandall, CFA, CAIA, now a member of CFA Society Minnesota Board of Directors, as an essential colleague in helping him network and plug in to the region.

“Tom was tremendous in getting me connected,” Nathan says. “I was amazed at how many members who didn’t know me at all were willing to spend an hour with me.”

Nathan is always thankful for connections, but he soon realized that CFA Society Minnesota offers so much more through its amazing members.

“It’s nice being part of a community and meeting with people who have the same dedication to advancing their knowledge in the investment industry, share ideas and have similar career aspirations,” he says. “We are all numbers people and we tend to get along.”

Nathan explains his joy of work: “Some people who really love data are analysts. Others are relational and enjoy talking with people and getting to know them. And then there are people who are in the middle — that’s me.”

In Nathan’s own words

How did you get engaged in the industry?

I would say I didn’t truly “engage” in the industry until I found the CFA Society Minnesota. My first few years in the industry I was focused on surviving. It wasn’t until I had a few years of experience that I started to look outward. When I found out more about the CFA Institute and local societies, it was exciting to know that I could be a part of a community of professionals. 

How do you engage with your community?

I am an executive mentor at the Minnesota State University Moorhead Business School. Each semester, I mentor seniors and help them understand the financial industry, types of jobs available, career tracks and designations. I also review résumés and help the students advance their writing and interviewing skills. 

How do you spend your free time?

Free time, what’s that? We have three kids 6 years old and under, and for some reason, we recently added a puppy to the mix. Free time is hard to come by, but I do enjoy golfing, hunting, and going to the lake on weekends.

Nathan Erickson holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Minnesota State University Moorhead and an MBA from the University of Mary.

Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn.

Intellisight 2020, from a Student’s Viewpoint

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By Jason Chen
Financial Math Graduate Student at University of Minnesota

Jason Chen

I went to the presentations of all three financial companies (Physicians Realty Trust, StoneCastle Finance, and Piper Sandler Companies). I chose these companies because I am a graduate student majoring in financial math, so I’m more familiar with this topic in general compared with consumer goods, industrials, etc. I wanted to learn more about these financial companies, what they do, and what information they would choose to make public. It was a great opportunity for me to know more about the industry and gain more experience. What I took away from these presentations was probably not as comprehensive as other audiences because I am not an investor, and the content of the presentation itself was not as useful to me at present. What was important to me was the experience: I learned how companies would introduce and present themselves, their concepts in the business, and how to handle questions and other unexpected things that can happen during a meeting. So, overall, that was a very interesting and helpful event for me.

A virtual conference is very different than an in-person one, and my overall experience of Intellisight 2020 was very positive. I’ll list some pros and cons on both sides from my perspective. Virtual conferences are very convenient and easier to organize. Audiences don’t have to physically go to the conference; they could simply log on virtually sitting in their office/home. Likewise, the organizer doesn’t have to set up the conference room/building, and there is not a lot of equipment needed. Theoretically, conference organizers would save a lot of time/energy preparing for the conference. But, speakers will deliver much better content in the in-person conferences. Speakers will have communications and interactions with the audiences and the audiences are able to participate more directly. It was very hard to stay focused on a screen to follow everything the speakers said all the way from the beginning until the last session in the afternoon. I believe audiences get tired easier and can be easily distracted in a virtual conference.

I think the organizers did a very great job preparing for the conference and made me feel like they had done it virtually many times. There were no mistakes or technical issues I experienced. But there were things I feel like could be improved. Each session was very short and limited from the company side that 35 minutes were not enough for them to finish everything. So, typically they went fast, and as a listener, it was very hard for me to catch and follow everything, especially when there was one session after another. We couldn’t see the speakers, so staring at the slides for the whole time was easy to lose focus and we couldn’t just raise our hands to ask questions, but instead needed to type in our questions. But the speakers would pause to wait for questions, and it would take a few minutes to just answer a question. So, after a few times, the audiences just didn’t ask questions.

I would participate in a virtual conference in the future. I believe the main reason that not too many people asked questions during the conference was each session was too short. Most presenters didn’t have enough time for Q&As. They only had time to answer 2 or 3 questions. So, if presentations were longer in the future, I would definitely participate. 

Milton Friedman Was Wrong About Everything

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By Susanna Gibbons, CFA
Managing Director, Carlson Funds Enterprise
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Susanna Gibbons, CFA

In 2013, Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece titled Milton Friedman, Unperson, in which he suggested that the Nobel Prize-winning economist had essentially vanished from the scene of economic policy-making. He highlighted two key points: First, not only is monetary policy not sufficient for management of an economic crisis, the Fed cannot even control the money supply itself using monetary policy. Second, the link between unemployment and inflation is tenuous at best, rendering it less-than-useful as a policy tool. We are seeing this play out today, as the Federal Government (at least initially) unleashed unprecedented fiscal stimulus in an effort to minimize the downside economic impact of the coronavirus-induced recession.

There is, though, another area where Milton Friedman’s influence continues to be felt. In 1970, he wrote an essay titled A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. This piece rested on the same free-market ideology upon which he built his economic theories, and essentially laid the groundwork for the greed-is-good generation. On this point, in spite of the steady march of the country towards incorporating ESG factors into their decision-making framework, policymakers from the Department of Labor continue to rely on the Friedman Doctrine. They have proposed new rules, which would impose burdensome requirements on anyone who dares to mention an ESG-based argument.

These rules display a real fear that this mysterious “ESG” is really a socialist plot intended to saddle pensioners with weak performance while simultaneously forcing corporations to provide chakra-reading reports instead of profits.  The rules require investment managers to prove that there are no non-economic considerations at play, imposing a new burden on those who have developed robust ESG integration policies to prove they don’t benefit personally, while strangely assuming that managers who do not integrate ESG are somehow engaged in a better fiduciary process because they ignore, say, the long-run economic risk of climate change.

The backstory for the proposed DOL rule is the Friedman Doctrine. The theory of shareholder supremacy really came into its own as a result of the initial LBO wave of the late 1980s, when entrenched managers were forced out of power by corporate raiders. I was fortunate to be sitting in Delaware Supreme court to hear the management of Macmillan explain why they could ignore Robert Maxwell’s higher bid for the sale of the company, and found their self-described actions to be such an egregious violation of their duty of loyalty. The Delaware Supreme Court agreed with me 😉 noting in its decision that evolving law required “the most scrupulous adherence to ordinary standards of fairness in the interest of promoting the highest values reasonably attainable for the stockholders’ benefit.” [1] So there it was, shareholder supremacy enshrined in law, and I agreed whole-heartedly with that decision.

That law, so seemingly straightforward, has become increasingly complicated to apply. In its decision, the Court did not say anything about ignoring the long-run consequences of legitimate business choices. It said that the Board and Management could not make decisions for their own benefit instead of the general shareholder. It is specific with respect to timeframe – this was part of an auction process, so there was no trade-off between the time preferences of different owners. This is actually a pretty narrow situation that has become broadly applied.

For a going concern, the concept of maximizing profit is beguilingly simple, but in real life, managers are constantly presented with complex trade-offs between short-term considerations (earnings this quarter) and the long-term health of the corporation (investing in supply chain redundancy to protect against loss of key products in a pandemic). And that’s really what ESG is all about: forcing all of us to think about the complexities of those trade-offs.

The only way to make sense of the Friedman Doctrine is to extend it well beyond the plain text of the original essay. The long-run health of the corporation, and therefore its ability to maximize profits, depends entirely upon the health of the system in which it does business. If it ignores the welfare of its employees, the health and safety of its customers, and the viability of land upon which it rests, its value will deteriorate. The corporation is a creation of the state – it owes its very existence to a political act. To have the little Adam of our labors[2] turn on is, claiming it owes us nothing, is preposterous on its face. If the corporate form does not serve society, then we can get rid of it.

But what the heck do I know? Milton Friedman was a Nobel prize-winning economist, and I’m just a middle-aged Mom sitting in the basement doing laundry.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme-court/1989/559-a-2d-1261-5.html

[2] This is a reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in case you never actually slogged your way through it.

A Letter from Our President

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Chris May, CFA

Thank you, is all I can say. As we close out the 2020 fiscal year (Sept 1 – Aug 31), I do not need to rehash all of what has transpired over the past 12 months (and continues to plague us daily). However, I do need to say thank you to so many people. While most of you do not think about CFA Society Minnesota (CFAMN) on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis, the staff and volunteers at CFAMN do and continue to make this organization thrive. Like most organizations, we had to unexpectedly shift the way we operate in March 2020. While we are still working on the best way to deliver content and meaningful connections, we have made some serious progress in these endeavors.

Recently, Intellisight was switched to an entirely virtual conference, on top of transitioning to a new platform vendor. At the beginning of the shutdown, the annual Putting Investors First event was both moved to a virtual format and the discussion was changed to reflect what was happening in the world.  We also had near-record attendance at the socially distanced golf outing. The staff worked hard to deliver these events, and many others, while battling the Zoom fatigue that we all have come to know so well.

I’d like to thank several individuals and groups, beginning with the staff:

Mark Salter – joined as our Executive Director in 2012 and has led the CFAMN team successfully since. We are lucky to have him guiding the organization while remaining calm and positive despite the challenges faced.

Diane Senjem – As she entered her ninth month of pregnancy, she was still hard at work preparing events and leading volunteer committees. Her ability to work ahead, gave everyone some breathing room when she went on maternity leave in April. She is now back, and we are grateful for that!

Megan Millett – The newest member of the team and likely the least well known as a result. Megan joined in a part-time capacity in 2019 and then stepped up in a big way (Intellisight 2020) as she moved to full-time earlier this year. She has delivered under pressure with grace and humor despite being the new kid on the block.

Additionally, I’d like to thank all of our volunteers. Whether you have helped at an event, contributed to the blog, served on a committee, or on the board, your contributions are critical to our success. While I won’t name all those that have contributed meaningfully, I did want to thank two individuals.

Sam Somuri, CFA, CFP, CAIA and Mark Traster, CFA both completed their terms as board members after serving eight and seven years, respectively. Thinking back to where our organization was at the time when they joined, we have made incredible strides and they were significant contributors to that success. Thank you both – although neither of you are off the hook yet entirely J

Another component of our success is the support that we receive from our sponsors. While this may not have been the year that any of us were expecting, we appreciate that you have stuck it out with us while we are doing our best to continue to deliver a positive experience for our members. Without you, we would have to cut back on many of the things that our members enjoy most. Thank you for your partnership.

To conclude, I want to thank our members. This has been a wild year and we appreciate the incredible patience that we have received from you all. We know that in many ways we weren’t able to deliver some of what you expected from us this year. We continue to try out ways to provide engaging content and offer opportunities to develop meaningful peer relationships. The latter has been particularly tricky thus far. However, on a positive note there has been a significant acceleration of our plans to offer more digital content (a special thanks to CFA Institute for providing us access to Zoom). This was the swift kick that we needed to get over a few hurdles. Thank you for bearing with us while we continue to refine this. Check out our archived webinars here.

In a year when everyday things were so hard, it feels good to think back on the positive aspects and to fully appreciate them. Be sure to check out our 2019 Annual Report to catch up on other activities. In a world of polarization and division, inclusiveness and gratitude are in short supply. Please join me in spreading the latter by thanking someone mentioned above.

Again, thank you all. We are looking forward to an even better year ahead.

Sincerely,

Chris May, CFA
Society President

PS – If you have not yet completed our short membership survey, please do. I get it, no one loves filling out surveys, but it helps inform our plans and we would greatly appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

Musings from My Laundry Room

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By Susanna Gibbons, CFA
Managing Director, Carlson Funds Enterprise
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Finishing my 15th week of WFH (Work From Home), I feel an urge to reach beyond the bounds of my new home office, just to see if anyone is still out there. Friday afternoon in the laundry room is a uniquely great setting for thinking about the world in a relatively unbound way. I am not exactly unplugged, but I am somewhat insulated from the chattering of the Street, so I thought I might start chattering a bit myself.

Like many of you, I have been amazed at the resurgence of equities since March (past few days notwithstanding). The market is placing a significantly higher probability on a V-shaped recovery than I am, so I have been trying to unpack the data here and there, since I don’t really want to be right. And the retail sales number from June 16 is the perfect place to start, since it was a surprisingly strong number – up an eye-catching 17.7% compared to expectations of +8.4%.  Yes, I am aware that if you are down 14.7% and then up 17.7% you are right back where you started. The number was still a really positive sign and clearly leaned in favor of a solid v-shaped recovery.

I am also aware that Autos were by far the largest part of that number, followed by Furniture. I know we don’t go out buying cars every day, or furniture, and that it was heavily promotional, but it was still a positive sign. Americans have not forgotten how to spend money! The V-shaped recovery might be within our grasp.

There is also one little tiny category that was not only up strongly in percentage terms, but actually exceeded spending from 2019: Sporting Goods, Hobby, Book, and Music Stores. This category of retail spending sounds like a boomer throwback category if there ever was one….I mean, music stores? It’s one of the few categories of retail sales that has seen virtually no growth since 2008. And yet there it was, popping up out of nowhere. Naturally, I had to talk to someone younger to figure this one out. Was everyone really buying CDs from newly re-opened record stores?

Nope. According to my sources, people-younger-than-I have realized that going to a gym for a group fitness class might not be fun for a long time. In what I am labeling the Peloton Effect, it seems they have swapped their gym memberships for Pelotons, NordicTracks, Mirrors, Bowflexes, bikes, and in what surely is an act of sheer desperation, golf clubs. I asked my source, who was recently furloughed, how it made any sense at all to purchase a $2,000 piece of equipment at this time. Apparently, this particular household had been spending $250 a month on yoga memberships, $150 a month on studio cycling, and another $50 on an ordinary gym. Those have all been canceled, and they are now left with $70 a month to finance the Peloton for the next two-plus years, and $30 a month to join their online classes –zoom-for-bikes. (They also had to get a new couch to make room for the bike, so maybe that helps explain the furniture sales numbers.) Significant monthly savings.

The important point here is that large numbers of people are shifting their behavior in dramatic ways. They are swapping monthly studio payments (bad news for commercial real estate owners) in favor of equipment ownership. To me, that minimizes to some degree the bounce we saw in retail sales. Shoppers are back, but their behavior has changed, and it would be a mistake to extrapolate sales growth right now because we are caught in the middle of this seismic shift. We are seeing this shift in other ways, too. Nobody needs nice pants anymore, we only need one nice jacket, we don’t go to the dry cleaners, we don’t get our hair cut. We do need a new router or laptop. Retail businesses may be re-opening, but many of us are re-thinking how we engage with the world, and how we allocate our resources. There is some up-front capital cost to the shift, but that short-term pop might be the front end of a long-term down-shift in overall spending.

Or not. The reason my laundry room looks so nice right now is because I could finally renovate after getting rid of the 25-year-old Heavy Bag that was part of our mid-90’s boxing-for-fitness routine. It’s been on the floor for most of its existence. I’m not going to get sucked down that hole again. Plus, it’s 12 weeks right now to get a Peloton.