>> What I like most about what I'm doing is that I get to meet
and interview really, really smart people.
And, for instance, right now we just added a long-short manager.
And what this manager does is he takes a look at, you know,
everything that's going on in the economy.
And then he tries to take advantage of what's going on in the economy in terms
of how he implements his positions in the portfolio.
So, the people that I meet with and talk to they're really, really bright and they talk
about what's going on in the economy.
And I ask them kind of how they spend their days, what they look at,
and how they make their decisions and how they make changes.
The other thing I like is I like I get to travel a lot because I follow about 60 managers
and I meet with them at least once a year.
So, for instance, next week I'm going to Denver and Houston
for two different conferences meeting with two different managers.
The other thing I like is I get to go to conferences.
I go to the Morningstar conferences Schwab conferences.
And in the past, I've gone
to Endowment/Foundation conferences and pension plans.
But you're constantly learning when you work in the investment field
because things are always changing.
Nothing ever says the same.
There's better ways to do things and better solutions so nothing stays the same.
It's always varied and it's always changing and there's always new technology.
But the basic principles somewhat stay the same.
The biggest challenge is probably when I started there they didn't have all the appropriate tools
that we needed to really monitor the portfolio and everything.
So, what I did was I purchased a lot of those tools.
And then just getting the investment committee of the firm
to look at things in a different way.
And getting them to look at it more like paying more attention to things like risk
and the standard deviation of the portfolio and those kinds of things.
So, it's just kind of getting people to look at things in new and different ways.
And our firm has great processes in terms of some of the things that they've done
that I haven't paid attention to.
For instance, we paid a lot of attention to individual stockholdings that the managers have.
When they've bought.
When they've sold.
Kind of why they're buying.
Why they're selling.
And in my past roles, we paid much less attention to that.
So, it's kind of really getting acclimated to kind of a new position.
And I've been there about five years in terms of how they do things.
And then also just trying to get them to do things a little bit differently
and that's always difficult when you have an established institution.
So, kind of making changes and, you know, making things better is always a challenge.