
Steven Romick
US-listed stocks across every FPA-managed account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Steven Romick runs First Pacific Advisors' flagship FPA Crescent Fund, which he has managed since its launch in 1993, and is a managing partner at the firm. He came to investing through an apprenticeship rather than business school: while a student at Northwestern in the mid-1980s, he joined Kaplan, Nathan & Co., a small partnership run by James Nathan, a friend of his father. Nathan trained him from the ground up — Romick has described sitting at a desk beside him and listening in on every call he made to companies — and that schooling in value investing set the template for his career. In 1990 Romick struck out on his own, founding Crescent Management to look for out-of-favor, low-risk investments across stocks, bonds and cash. He brought that firm's go-anywhere approach to FPA when he joined in 1996, running a single flexible portfolio rather than a walled-off stock fund. He describes his philosophy as "winning by not losing": an absolute-value investor who is willing to sit in cash when nothing clears his bar. His defining moment came in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, when he built the fund's cash position to roughly 45% by the fourth quarter of that year, having largely avoided the financial stocks that then collapsed. In 2013 Morningstar named Romick and his team its U.S. Allocation Fund Manager of the Year. He earned a bachelor's degree from Northwestern in 1985 and is a CFA charterholder.
First Pacific Advisors reports US-listed stocks across every account it manages, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Each fund reports its own holdings separately. The two views overlap but do not add up — a fund's holdings are not a slice of the firm's total.