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 plays guitar and drums on the worship team at his church in Connecticut, and dabbles in cooking, whisky, progressive rock and beating Ben at trivia.
Articles by Rusty:
Part 2 of the Notes from the Road series, about the value of and problems with adaptive frameworks. In this installment, an exploration of…
In baseball and in investing and in life, we often miss the obvious truths that are staring us in the face. Sometimes that delusion is willful and sometimes it is accidental.
In Part 1 of his Notes from the Road series, Rusty takes us to Ireland. There he begins an exploration of path-dependence and priors in our thinking as investors and citizens.
Part 3 of the Three-Body Alpha series, written for anyone puzzled by value’s underperformance over the past NINE YEARS. Systematic value still works in markets warped by the Three-Body Problem, but works differently.
Investing requires mental toughness, but it doesn’t require us to pretend that we — or our colleagues — are invincible. More often, it instead requires us to acknowledge our weakness.
Many of the memes that drive our political behaviors inherently push us toward Competitive Games and tribalism. Resisting these memes means losing both arguments and credibility – and we have to be willing to do both.
Part 2 of the multi-part Three-Body Alpha series, introduced in Rusty’s recent Investing with Icarus note. The Series seeks to explore how the increasing transformation of fundamental and economic data into abstractions may influence strategies for investing — and how it should influence investors accessing them.
The allure of a fundamental truth is powerful. Investors are hungry for that kind of clarity about markets, but it doesn’t exist. In the first in a series, Rusty discusses a framework for investing in a time of Icarus.
The #1 question investors ought to ask of a financial services company trying to sell them something is: “What is it, really?” If you don’t know what you’re investing in, you’re liable to end up eating a lot of crunchy frogs.
Most investors think that other investors think that last week’s correction was about vol-selling. The real story? Everybody knows that everybody knows that inflation will change the way portfolios are built and managed.