Brendan Wagner

I joined MONTAG in 2017 after managing families’ equity and fixed income portfolios at other investment firms in Atlanta. Now I manage portfolios for both individuals and families and I spend a significant amount of time on equity research. The reason I love what I do is the reason I chose to work in this industry in the first place so many years ago. I find investing in publicly traded equities to be interesting and incredibly worthwhile.

We get the ability to buy an ownership stake in a company without paying a control premium, whereas an acquirer of an entire company must offer existing shareholders a substantial premium to part ways with their shares. We have the opportunity to take advantage of a market with millions of different participants with different time frames and risk tolerances. Sometimes that offers us bargain prices for premium investments.

The challenge is that this goes against human nature. When something is undervalued and not cheap, but undervalued in relation to the quality of the asset, it's typically during a rough patch for the company or the economy, meaning it can be stomach turning to buy. In order to be successful in this business, Warren Buffett put it well: To be a great investor, you don't need to have a terrific IQ.

What you do need is the right temperament. Having or developing the right temperament for investing in public equities sometimes means being willing to look wrong in the near term in order for the long term to be successful. Or as Jim Grant said, successful investing means having everyone agree with you later. My strategy with clients is to first properly assess their risk tolerance and longer-term goals.

This comes by developing a trusting relationship with each client and having as many conversations as it takes to really determine what they're comfortable with. Then we can set up our investing process appropriately, avoiding the need to course correct in the middle of tumultuous periods, which is a sure way to harm long-term returns. There are many investors trying to predict earnings beats, recession beginnings and ends, and timing of bear markets.

I firmly believe that we as senior wealth managers advantage ourselves and our clients by being humble about what is realistically achievable in terms of predictions or being right. We have a better chance of assessing a business's quality of management, strategy, and end market than we do of successfully estimating the other myriad of investment topics out there. My goal is to help clients become the strong hand in investing.

That means not being euphoric at the top or despondent at the bottom. Because if we have been moderately conservative before we run into turmoil, then we get to buy when the scared money sells.