FPA Crescent Fund

Steven Romick

Part of First Pacific Advisors

These are FPA Crescent Fund's own holdings, not the firm's. Percentages are of the stock positions in its latest filing — the fund's cash and bonds are not included. A single portfolio that roams across stocks, bonds, and cash, and holds little when nothing looks right — that is what FPA Crescent is. Launched in 1993, it has had one manager, Steven Romick, and one mandate: to hunt out-of-favor, low-risk investments wherever they sit, with capital preservation treated as the first job. Romick brought this go-anywhere approach with him when he joined First Pacific Advisors in 1996 from Crescent Management, his own firm, so the fund was never a walled-off stock fund. He is willing to park the whole book in cash when nothing clears his bar, describing the philosophy as "winning by not losing." The defining test of that discipline came in the run-up to 2008. As the financial system frayed, Romick built the fund's cash stake to roughly 45% by the fourth quarter of that year, having largely avoided the bank and financial stocks that then collapsed. In 2013 Morningstar named him and his team its U.S. Allocation Fund Manager of the Year. Romick, a CFA charterholder who now serves as a managing partner at the firm, learned the trade as an apprentice beside James Nathan at Kaplan, Nathan & Co. in the mid-1980s rather than in business school; he graduated from Northwestern in 1985.