Denver money manager Tom Marsico played the 1990s mutual fund bubble perfectly.
He delivered 20%-plus returns to investors at Janus mutual funds. He left the firm in 1997 and started his own namesake mutual fund company.
He then sold the company he built in less than three years to Bank of America for $1 billion, and continued to work there, racking up respectable gains for his investors, as always.
But Marsico made the biggest leveraged bet of his life just before the mortgage bubble popped. In 2007, he bought back his firm from Bank of America for about $2.5 billion.
Why was he so right in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and so wrong in 2007?
Marsico has an answer.
Click here to read it in my column.
November 21, 2010
Tom Marsico seems like a first class human being. But I have to say, if top flight money managers did not have the wisdom and understanding to move to safe harbor by September 2007, then I have little confidence in their ability to navigate what is coming.
The lights were screaming red and the truth was there for those who wanted to see it. I would be hesitant to work with any money manager that missed the indicators and did not move to cash by May of 2008.
All the Best,
Mark