Anne-Marie Peterson - The Capital System

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:59)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:28)
My guest today is Anne-Marie Peterson. Anne-Marie is an equity portfolio manager at Capital Group, a storied investment firm managing two and a half trillion dollars and getting ready to celebrate its centennial anniversary.
Anne-Marie is a seasoned investor approaching three decades in the industry with nearly 20 of those years being with Capital. She has become an expert in retail and restaurants and many other sectors and shares her thinking and strategies in those areas. We discuss her people-first approach, simplicity as a criteria for investment, and the idea that the best retailers are cults. Please enjoy this great discussion with Anne-Marie Peterson.
All right, where to begin? I feel as though we talked about this last time we talked that Capital Group is such an interesting place and culture with so many investors who are so good, who have been there for so long. It's a little bit opaque from the outside looking in, and so just to set the stage for the rest of our conversation, can you give a description of your personal setup at Capital Group? What do you invest in? How much money do you manage? What's your team like? The context that you live in, I think, would inform so much else of what we're going to talk about today.

**Anne-Marie Peterson** (3:34)
Capital is very special. We're about to celebrate our 100-year anniversary, and we have 2.5 trillion that we invest on half of our clients.
And most of that is equity, but we have a large fixed-income business as well. But what's special is, in an industry that hasn't scaled, most don't scale, and most don't endure, capital has. I know you're interested in companies like that. I'm interested in investing in companies like that. But capital itself is sort of a case study, and something deeply special. And so why is that? There are a couple reasons. The first is our founder, John Lovelace.
His father founded the business in the 30s. He was investing right after the Great Depression. He came to Los Angeles after the crash to basically launch an investment management firm. His son came along, John Lovelace, who really took capital to where it was. And his interest, he wasn't a star. He was interested in assembling a collection of people that were different and distinctive, women and men, to manage money.