Rusty Guinn
Co-Founder and CEO
Rusty Guinn is co-Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners, LLC, and has been a contributing author to Epsilon Theory since 2017.
Before Ben and Rusty established Second Foundation, Rusty served in a variety of investment roles in several organizations. He managed and operated a $10+ billion investment business, led investment strategy for the second largest wealth management franchise in Houston, and sat on the management committee of the 6th largest public pension fund in the United States.
Most recently, Rusty was Executive Vice President over the retail and institutional asset management businesses at Salient Partners in Houston, Texas. There he oversaw the 5-year restructuring and transition of Salient’s $10 billion money management business from legacy fund-of-funds products to a dedicated real assets franchise.
He previously served as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Opportunistic Investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $12 billion portfolio spanning public and private investments. Rusty also served as a portfolio manager for TRS’s externally managed global macro hedge fund and long-only equity portfolios. He led diligence, process development and the allocation of billions of dollars across a wide range of indirect and principal investments.
Rusty’s career also includes roles with de Guardiola Advisors, an investment bank serving the asset management industry, and Asset Management Finance, a specialized private equity investor in asset management companies.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School, and lives on a farm in Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Pam and sons Winston and Harry. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Youth Symphony, and with Pam has been a long-time supporter and founding Friend of the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He also serves as a member of the Easton Volunteer Fire Company in Easton, Connecticut. Rusty spends his free time smoking meat, working his apple orchard, enjoying whisky, badly butchering progressive rock drumming and jeopardizing long-term relationships through high-stakes board games.
Articles by Rusty:
Let’s make this Our Finest Hour. From the bottom up.
When people stop asking “How much worse is this going to get” and start asking “How much longer is this going to last”, things really start changing.
But we can change that, too.
After a few weeks of historic market volatility, we reexamine the framework we would use to think about the implications of Covid-19 and the mitigation response for multi-asset portfolios.
Levering up a portfolio based on a model that we know cannot act as a representation of the state of the world is perilous.
Doing the same with a country is far, far worse.
The structurally bullish will warn us against failure of nerve. The traders will warn us against hesitation. The structurally bearish will warn us about being unable to shift into a defensive shape. But what we should be worried about now is a lack of imagination.
There’s a lot of first-level thinking going on, and navigating the transition from uncertain markets back to risky markets means avoiding their pitfalls in our portfolio and risk management processes.
Covid-19 is a fertile ground for narratives and missionaries of all kinds – from politicians to central banks, corporate leaders and financial media pundits. Join us as we discuss them.
In a potential recession, need isn’t evenly distributed. In a pandemic, that’s even more true. The time to start helping is now.
In 1995 we crossed a line in music.
In 2009 we crossed that line in markets.
In 2016 we crossed that line in politics.
Music charted the way back. Let’s listen to its lesson.
Quantitative analysis is all well and good, but when someone starts peddling you charts or measures when you KNOW that the underlying data is unknowable, you are dealing with a cargo cultist. When it comes to Covid-19, nobody has time for that.
As of February 27, even after a 10% drawdown, we believe the Narrative about Covid-19 is complacent.