Well, I have actually been investing in the stock market since I was eight years old and my first company was a yogurt, frozen yogurt company. But what I really love about what I do today is that it involves my love of healthcare investing and I actually come from a long line of physicians. My mother is a doctor, my father is a doctor and my grandmother practiced medicine for 60 years. So investing in healthcare, I get to combine my passion for the stock market with my passion for healthcare and medicine.
I started my career in the financial services industry on the sell side. So I was doing the analytical work that I really liked, so I love science, I was a chemistry undergrad, business degree, I was looking for way to combine those. I ended up as a biotech analyst initially. But what I found was there was a really heavy element of salesmanship and servicing clients that really didn’t generate the satisfaction that I got by digging in and actually analyzing the companies and their prospects and the science and learning as I was coming to work every day. That was the nidus for moving over to the buy side and becoming initially an analyst, eventually a portfolio manager.
Our goal is to deliver long-term risk-adjusted results for our clients. And our objective is really to outperform our peers, our healthcare benchmark and the broader markets over the course of an economic cycle.
We at Janus Henderson are fundamental analysts and fundamental investors. So this is a bottom’s up approach. When we pick the stocks that we are going to populate the portfolio with, we are looking at an estimate, our estimate of intrinsic value and the discount that we see between what the market is affording that company and what we see as intrinsic value. In addition, we are taking a broader look from a top-down point-of-view, mostly for the purposes of managing risk and diversification within the portfolio. Andy and I co-manage the fund and then there are five experienced analysts each covering a subsector of healthcare, working with us to develop the portfolio.
Healthcare is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy and that is true around the world. And it is driven by both innovation where we are seeing an acceleration of innovation with new technologies that are helping to address some of the largest unmet medical needs, as well as aging populations. And the elderly spend three times as much on healthcare as the rest of the population and we are going to have 10,000 baby boomers reaching retirement age every day through 2030. So we think both of these factors will be major drivers of healthcare growth for many years to come.
This is not an area for the faint-hearted when it comes to investing. If you look at the level of dispersion from the winners and the losers over any period of time, over a year, over three years, the winners in healthcare are big winners, the losers in healthcare can be big losers. And you want somebody who has a lot of experience with markets and with understanding the science and the details, doing that on your behalf. This is an area that lends itself to professional management and specialization.
When I joined our firm back in 1999, our founder, Tom Bailey, told me, “The goal of a Janus Analyst is to get to know our companies as well or better than anyone.” And I think that really sums up my investment approach pretty well.
So I live in Colorado, which means that I am a biker. So I am on my bike. But I also run, I like to play soccer with my kids and play guitar.
When I am not thinking about healthcare stocks, which is a couple of hours a week, I like to play tennis, I like to ski with my kids and I am a real movie buff.
I am Ethan Lovell, Portfolio Manager and Research Analyst at Janus Henderson.
My name is Andy Acker, I am a Portfolio Manager and Research Analyst at Janus Henderson.