ArrowMark Partners

James England

US-listed stocks across every ArrowMark account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. James England is the portfolio manager behind the Meridian Contrarian Fund at ArrowMark Partners, a role he has held since 2001. His path to that job wound through the trading desks of investment banking: after a degree from McGill and an MBA from the Ivey School of Business, he worked as a consumer and retail analyst at the Los Angeles brokerage The Seidler Companies, then in equity sales and trading at Goldman Sachs, and finally as an equity derivatives trader at Toronto Dominion Securities. He carried that market-making background into investing in out-of-favor companies. ArrowMark Partners itself was founded in Denver in 2007 by three former Janus Capital Group executives, David Corkins, Karen Reidy, and Minyoung Sohn. England did not start the firm; he arrived through Aster Investment Management, where he became a principal, and which ArrowMark absorbed in 2013, bringing the contrarian strategy and its manager along with it. The approach is a risk-first form of value investing. England looks for small- and mid-sized companies that the market has pushed aside, where fundamental research can expose a gap between the current stock price and a company's longer-term worth — and where a visible catalyst for improvement gives reason to think the gap will close. The strategy is built around downside protection rather than chasing upside, holding out-of-favor businesses with quality balance sheets and strong barriers to entry, and sticking with them through a patient holding period. It is, in effect, the kind of investing a former derivatives trader would design: less about betting on a rally than about making sure you do not get hurt on the way down.

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