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June 27, 2019 at 12:00 PM
Ken Stuzin Title: Portfolio Manager Years with present firm: 23 years Years in financial services: 33 years Investment/asset class focus: Large Cap U.S. Equity
Asset Management Firm: Brown Advisory Firm’s headquarters: Baltimore Year firm was founded: 1993 Number of employees and/or partners: 662 employees Assets under management/advisement as of Dec. 31, 2018: $66 billion
Brown Advisory Portfolio Manager Ken Stuzin, who has led the firm’s large cap growth strategy for almost 22 years, says he invests more in business models than in stocks. That approach is working well, as the strategy is one of two winners in the Large Cap Growth U.S. Equity category of the Envestnet/Investment Advisor Asset Manager Awards for 2019.
In 2018, the strategy returned 5.89% and outperformed the Russell 1000 Growth Index by 7.41%, putting Brown within the top decile of performance relative to AMA peers in large cap growth.
As Stuzin explains, Brown has a long-term view, with turnover sometimes taking five years. “We’ve owned some companies for 11-12 years,” he says, but look for great companies that will “traverse storms that hit, irrespective of the kind.”
In 2018, the portfolio didn’t have much turnover, was heavy in healthcare and technology, and was 700 basis points ahead of the benchmark. The strategy has a rule of concentrating its holdings to 30-35 stocks and focusing on best in breed. “Institutional pools of money don’t want to pay for beta,” Stuzin says. “If we owned 80 names, we would look like a benchmark.”
