Gary transitioned from a successful investment analyst career to senior management, taking on institutional leadership roles at firms like Goldman Sachs and Janus. He later founded Black Capital and successfully built it into a multi-million-dollar firm before selling it to Calamos Investments.
Six years of being the best in the business. In the late nineties, you decide to take a slight detour to get on the management side of business. But let's quickly jump into how all the other firms started calling because of your background.
I went to the buy side, to your point, ran the institutional business in 2001, I think was Alliance bought Bernstein, and at that point we started working more closely with the Alliance people on the growth side. So, I had both growth and value reporting to me under the institutional business. I'd say it was about 2001. Goldman Sachs approached me about joining them to run all of their distribution in the US, so, institutional business, the retail business, and then the wholesalers who called on Goldman's brokers, the private client folks. And from there, because I had a investment background, I was appointed the CIO of their active equity business and had all the portfolio managers and analysts from the growth team, the value team, Europe, emerging markets, Asia, all reporting into me.
That didn't last long because somebody else came calling. Yeah, Janus Capital came calling. They had gone through many troubles. They had bought way too many growth stocks without having a good price discipline. They had market timing issues and then they got rid of their founder, who was the CEO. And I was given carte blanche by the board to fix it. However I felt, and the board and I, we decided that I was going to depart and I went and started my own firm called Black Capital. At the time we had five or six global analysts. We had global perspectives for each of their industries, and I was the portfolio manager and I brought in somebody else to be my co-portfolio manager. We hired a couple distribution heads, and over the next couple years we grew the business from zero to a couple hundred million dollars.
It caught the attention of a CEO who had started his own business, John Calamos, Chicago - from Chicago. And John had gone through a really tough period of performance and John needed to hire somebody who could basically run the investment team. So, he bought my firm. This was about 2011 or so, maybe it was 2012. And I joined Calamos as the global CIO and president and replaced Nick Calamos, who was the founder's partner, for lack of a better word. And what I did is I brought a bunch of analysts in to Calamos, fundamental; Calamos was much more quant driven at the time, and brought in people again, like Janus employees who were fundamental based. And we built a good track record and we turned around the performance and things were pretty good.
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