Amy Zhang - Identifying Exceptional Potential

Tano Santos (0:01)

Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. I'm your host, Tano Santos, David and Elsie Doc, Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School, and the Faculty Director at the Helbron Center for Graham and Dodd Investing.

And here with me is my co-host, Michael Maboussin, a faculty member here as well at Helbron, and of course, Head of Conciling Research at Counterpoint Global, inside Morgan Stanley. Hi, Michael. How are you doing?

Michael Mauboussin (0:24)

I'm great, Tano. How are you? It's awesome to see you today.

Tano Santos (0:27)

Yeah, it's great. Last week, we had our Helbron faculty meeting, which marks the end of the academic year here at the Center. I think we had a great year. Wonderful to be back in person to have at least some of the events. Again, in person, the Omaha Dinner, so many of the stock picking challenges.

And it's a thing of wonder to reflect on the last two years and thinking about what is going on in markets these days. So any reflections about the academic year, Michael?

Michael Mauboussin (0:51)

Yeah. Well, I guess two things really stand out to me. One is it was just great to be back in the classroom, right? We have a beautiful new campus and it gave me a renewed appreciation of what the energy is like and what it's like being with students. So I really enjoyed that. And second, boy, so many interesting things going on, both analytically and in the market. So it was a very rich semester of lots of things to talk about and analyze. That was super fun, too.

Tano Santos (1:14)

Yeah. And particularly with our guests today. So we have a wonderful guest and we're going to get together conversation going and learn all about sailboats and motorboats to which we shall return.

So our guest today is Amy Zhang, Executive Vice President, Portfolio Manager of the Alger Small Cap Focus, Alger Mid Cap Focus, Alger Mid Cap 40, and Alger Small Cap Growth Strategies. Before joining Alger, Amy spent well over a decade at Brown Capital Management, co-managing the Brown Capital Management and Small Company Fund.

Our listeners may have seen profiles of Amy because she's been featured everywhere recently in the Wall Street Journal, in Barron, in the DFT, in the New York Times. Amy was named one of the best female PMs to invest with now by Morningstar in 2022, and one of the top 20 female portfolio managers by Citywire in 2018, 19, 21 She won the Women in Asset Management award in 2021 Too many accolades to name them all. But most importantly, Amy is an alum of Columbia Business School, and we're always delighted to welcome one of our alums and basically bask in Columbia Business School community. So Amy, welcome to the Value Investing with Legends podcast, and thank you so much for being here.

Amy Zhang (2:29)

Thank you Tano for the kind introduction, and it's great to be here with you and Michael.

Michael Mauboussin (2:34)

So Amy, maybe let me kick off. We always love to start to learn about our guests' background. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the asset management industry?

Amy Zhang (2:44)

I was born and raised in Shanghai.

I won an academic scholarship to come to the US. That was selected from 2,000 students in Shanghai. I received an IB degree there. It was a mini UN. We had 200 students from 70 countries. About a quarter of that is from the US. So that was a very formative experience.

Then decided I come from more of a science background on my whole family members.

My parents are both chemical engineers. My grandparents are doctors and chemical engineers. So I was the black sheep in the family. But of course, I wanted to broaden my horizon after high school. So that time, there's no money flowing. So I won several different scholarship merit-based.

I decided to go to Manhattan View College because I felt the liberal arts education would really broaden my horizons. And it really did. I learned a lot, including history of jazz, history classes. And I think it really helped me see the world before I think I was very narrow, being like a math and the science kid.

So I really am very grateful for that experience. But I was still a math and computer science major there. Naturally, my parents were very proud of me when I did a programming internship. So I did several programming internships. I was actually assistance as well. But one of the programming internship that I still remember was in Port Chester, New York that was to a wealth management firm that my job was to debug a program, I think. I think it's a performance software that really piqued my interest in finance. And then after that, I rushed back to campus as since we didn't have a finance major, I decided to change major to be economics with a concentration in finance.