Christopher Mack is a portfolio manager on the global equity team at Harding Loevner, an investment management company based in Bridgewater, New Jersey with some $65 billion under management. In addition to portfolio management duties like security selection, portfolio allocation, and investment strategy, Chris is also an analyst in the information technology space. He has been with the firm since 2004 and previously served as a research associate.
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc, Also read Lear Capital: Financial Products You Should Avoid?
Chris is a co-manager of the Harding Loevner Global Equity Fund (HLMGX). Over the 15-year period ending 4/20/18, its annual return has been 10.46%, outperforming its benchmark, the MSCI ACWI ex USA index, by 160 basis points. Over that 15-year period, it ranks in the 15th percentile of its Morningstar peer group.
Chris holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and earned a BA in economics and business from Lafayette College
I interviewed Chris last week.
Can you provide some background on Harding Loevner and its approach to investing?
Harding Loevner is a global investment manager founded in 1989 by the investment managers of the Rockefeller Family Office. We’ve invested in global equities since the beginning. We look at the world as one opportunity set and focus on quality, growing businesses. That’s the best way to invest in the long term.
Our process was developed with behavioral finance in mind – to minimize bias and eliminate groupthink in our decision-making as much as possible. We operate with complete internal transparency with all the research recorded and openly shared. We do that so we can engage in a provocative debate and critique one another’s analysis. There’s one key attribute – we require individual accountability and incentivize our team based on the outcomes of their individual decisions. We call it “collaboration without consensus.” The idea is that we want to take advantage of our diverse investment team, both in experience as well as where they lived in their careers, in their lives, and be able to harness that and benefit from cognitive diversity. That’s essential to harnessing our best thinking.
Why should investors consider a global allocation?
It’s important to look at the world as one opportunity set, as I mentioned earlier. It’s your best defense to be globally diversified, and people oftentimes forget that some of the largest companies in terms of profitability are outside the U.S. in a particular industry. Investing globally allows you to build a diversified portfolio not only by region but by sector as well. Looking at that total opportunity set gives you a lot of flexibility to craft a portfolio which gives you a better chance to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns over time than relying on any particular region.
What’s different about the Harding Loevner’s active approach?
It comes down to our collaboration-without-consensus culture as well as the discipline in adhering to our process. With that combination, we arm ourselves with tools to minimize the biases that often plague human decision making. One such tool, which we use at the portfolio level, is to examine our holding periods to make sure we’re not succumbing to the endowment effect, and give more value to something because we own it. Another is our research database, which stores all our research and investment communications. We can look back over time and analyze whether a good portfolio outcome was the result of luck or our skill as investors. That allows you to get better and continuously improve over time. It’s our commitment to our process that’s distinctive.
Read the full article here by Robert Huebscher, Advisor Perspectives
