Asset Manager of the Year Todd Gervasini on Finding ‘Pockets of Inefficiencies’

The Wakefield Large Cap Equity Strategy topped the roughly 22% returns of the S&P 500 Index in 2017 by close to 10%.

How did the team accomplish this? “It was primarily driven … by individual security selection. We weren’t overweighted in any sectors,” said Todd Gervasini, chief investment officer and founder of Wakefield Asset Management. “We didn’t have any large positions in any one stock or any two small positions.”

Supporting its stock selection, is Wakefield’s core belief that although the markets are very efficient, “there are pockets of inefficiencies … in the marketplace,” Gervasini said, “and we think we’ve come up with a strategy to try to take advantage of them.”

This investing process, which the CIO says is “disciplined and consistent,” is run by younger professionals who tend “not [to be] from traditional investment management firms.” That’s because “we want them to think the Wakefield way and not the typical Wall Street way,” he explained.

The Wakefield approach involves looking at the markets “very differently — much more like an accountant as opposed to a predictor or an analyst,” according to Gervasini.