Husky Tracks
Horn trumpets global markets
The financial turmoil striking economies in Asia, Russia,
and Latin America in recent months has led to huge sell-offs and plummeting
stock markets. Which is just how one of the world's top-performing global
equity managers, Bernard Horn, likes it. While many investors have taken
fright, Horn, BA'78, remains calm, waiting for the best bargains and stalking
faltering markets like a cat on the prowl.
"I haven't seen good buys like this in some time," he says
from his posh office in downtown Boston. "When other people get nervous
and panicked, and sell stocks for the wrong reasons, that's when I love
to buy, that's when the bargains are just all over the place."
Horn's bargain-hunting strategy has been hugely successful since he
founded Polaris Capital Management in 1995, a fact noted by the PIPER and
Nelson's databases, which rank investment managers. In March, PIPER ranked
Polaris Capital as the top global equity money manager for both one-year
and five-year periods. Nelson's has listed Polaris among its top twenty
money managers in the world for the last three years, most recently at
the end of June.
Horn, Polaris's president and portfolio manager, calls himself a pure
value investor, seeking out companies with the most undervalued cash flow
or assets, regardless of country or industry. He applies his own screening
methods to whittle a list of more than 16,000 companies down to a portfolio
of 50 to 100 holdings. This process has led to a 23.8 percent average annual
return on Polaris's funds over the last five years.
"There's really no secret to my success," Horn says. "Maybe
other people have [secret methods], but I don't have anything other than
a strong degree of persistence and a strong focus on making clients money."
And clients have taken note; Polaris had more than $70 million under management
for individual and institutional investors in October, up $20 million from
last spring. Horn formerly required a minimum investment of $5 million,
but in June he started a fund with a $2,500 minimum.
Horn became interested in global investing in 1976 while co-oping at
Gillette. Back at school, he was president and treasurer of N.U.'s Financial
Management Association and winner of the Harold Hodgkinson Achievement
Award for outstanding graduating students. Horn credits his professors
with encouraging him to pursue his interest in money management. After
graduating in 1978, Horn went on to get a master's degree from the Sloan
School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Looking back, Horn expresses pride in his achievements. He's made it
this far on determination as much as financial acumen. "Perseverance
and focus are a large part of it," he says. "You have to assimilate
a large [amount of] information when you're thinking of the world as an
investment universe. That's pretty important. You have to be a bargain
hunter."
- Meghan Irons
Fisby tosses off reporting
When Wall Street Journal White House correspondent
Michael Frisby decided last summer he'd leave journalism for a public relations
job, he had no idea Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr would release the
lengthy and graphic report on the Monica Lewinsky affair.
But the lost chance to cover the biggest story of the decade-the possible
toppling of a U.S. president-did not faze Frisby. After twenty-two years
in journalism, six of them covering Bill Clinton, Frisby, a 1977 journalism
graduate, decided it was time to quit.
"The fact that I'm not regretting missing the story or not being
in on the story is a sign that I've grown a little bit away from this,
and that it's time for me to do something a little different," he
says.
Frisby stayed on the beat long enough to become one of only two reporters
in the White House press corps who had been covering Clinton since his
first bid for the presidency in 1992. In the early going, Frisby found
camaraderie with other reporters and the administration, but in recent
years that bond weakened.
"What I found myself doing was basically dealing with a new cast
of characters in the White House and a new cast of characters around me
as colleagues, and it just wasn't fun anymore," he says.
Frisby's career in journalism began while he was on co-op at the Boston
Globe, where he ran errands for former editor and current mentor Thomas
Winship by day and wrote stories for the paper by night. His clips were
so impressive that an editor with whom Frisby had interviewed in Minneapolis
called the Globe to verify that Frisby had indeed authored the stories
he submitted.
Frisby was hired by the Dayton Daily News in 1977, the Cleveland Plain
Dealer in 1979, and the Globe in 1982, where over the span of a decade
he covered city hall, became city hall bureau chief, and then became a
Washington correspondent.
The Wall Street Journal was so impressed with his stories on Clinton's
1992 campaign that it hired him as a White House correspondent. Earlier
this year, the White House Correspondent Association presented Frisby with
the Aldo Beckman Award for Distinguished White House coverage for a series
of stories he wrote on Clinton and race.
At forty-four, Frisby is now on the other side of the media fence, as
vice president of the giant public relations firm Porter Novelli in Washington,
D.C. He says his ability to listen and work with people, manage crises,
and help novices understand the media makes him a natural for the job.
"I don't have any regrets," he says of leaving journalism.
"I feel that for twenty-two years I really gave all of my strength
and energy to journalism and being a good reporter. Now it's time to do
something else."
- Meghan Irons
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