What’s the most important job of a chief investment officer? Creating and sustaining an organization that can make good investmentdecisions.

February 6, 2014 Leave a comment

chief investment officers

Tom Brakke

January 29, 2014

There has been a lot happening at PIMCO.  Although Mohamed El-Erian is still listed on the website as co-chief investment officer, he resigned eight days ago.  Now there are six new deputy chief investment officers.

“Each individual deputy CIO will have some empowerment that probably was lacking to some extent in the past, so that will improve,” Bill Gross was quoted as saying in response to the new roles.

In considering PIMCO, are you getting a man or an organization?  That is an important question.  I was shocked this weekend when the Twitter avatar for the firm was a picture of Bill Gross, so I tweeted, “see the @pimco avatar ~ no pretense about an organization; it’s a person.”  It has since been changed back to the corporate logo.

The firm says that it has 738 investment professionals; I believe that more than a hundred are called portfolio managers.  How much empowerment do they have?  Another question worth asking.

But let’s jump to a broader question.  What’s the most important job of a chiefinvestment officer?

My answer:  Creating and sustaining an organization that can make good investmentdecisions.

Yet that is far down the list of duties at the majority of firms, if it’s mentioned at all, and clients don’t pay attention — for the most part, they just want to know what the big guythinks about the market.

For now, the topic has changed.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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