Back to basics
“We don’t just buy a load of emerging markets but tend to target specific ones. This year, emerging markets we’ve liked include Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and Turkey. That’s really the only time we’ll take a significant amount of currency risk.”
After many years of tackling fixed
income, Gartside stresses that central to his investment philosophy is going back to
the basic idea of the bond investor as a moneylender.
He says: “If you think of what an equity investor is, he or she is buying a share of future profits, so that’s a certain mindset. What the bond investor’s doing is lending money, which is a radically different mindset.
“If you’re taking people’s money in and then lending it, you worry about getting it back; you worry about the interest rate; whether they can afford to pay the regular interest payments to you; and whether you’ll get it back at the end.
“You are looking at that company, or that country, through a very different lens. That’s why we regard ourselves, effectively, as modern-day loan officers that you would have found in a bank.”
Biography
Nick Gartside is managing director and international chief investment officer of JP Morgan Asset Management’s Global Fixed Income, Currency & Commodities group. Prior to joining the firm in 2010, he worked at Schroders for eight years, initially as a euro government bond portfolio manager.
In 2007, he moved to the global bond team as a global government bond portfolio manager and most recently served as the head of global fixed income. He began his career at Mercury Asset Management/Merrill Lynch Investment Managers.
