The Cookware Salesman Made Good

His name, Churchill Franklin, sounds like the hybrid of two unforgettable politicians: Winston Churchill meets Ben Franklin. But the CEO of Boston-based Acadian Asset Management, which oversees $80 billion in assets, has a background and a management philosophy that are anything but conventional.

In fact, 68-year-old Franklin oversees 20 strategic funds focused on global and U.S. regions, risk, leverage, and long/short. He calls the firm’s overall approach “active quantitative,” driven by analytics and data.

Franklin, a native of Darien, Connecticut, majored in American literature at Middlebury College in Vermont and once sold pots and pans door-to-door. That selling job taught him the basics of listening to a customer’s needs and fitting a product to the customer, skills he placed in his toolbox that have never left him. “Even with pots and pans, I did not want people to feel sold to. If they needed a pan, it was a win-win,” he says.

After college, he toiled as a carpenter in frosty Vermont for two years and was rebuffed by several publishing houses for a job in New York. He realized he needed to produce some steady income and knew that, in 1974, commercial banks were hiring liberal arts majors. He secured a job at the Bank of Boston, transferred into commercial lending, and was on his way.

A stint as assistant treasurer at Thermo Electron Corp. (now called Thermo Fisher Scientific) helped him hone his financial skills and led him to hook up with financial whiz Gary Bergstrom, who was developing a quantitative investment process. Bergstrom wanted to develop a fund based on his quantitative non-U.S. small-cap strategy, and he partnered with Franklin.

They formed Acadian in 1986. It took them 18 months to nab their first client, Bell Atlantic, which hired them to develop an international equity strategy.

Incrementally, Acadian saw its assets start to grow. They increased to $2.5 billion in 1993 and $6 billion in 2000, and by 2017 had proliferated to $80 billion.

富兰克林解释说，该公司的定量方法“脱离了决策过程。”Acadian的分析围绕着四个关键因素：价值，质量，增长和势头。

“Think about the fundamental drivers of return,” Franklin says. “Value is the easiest. If two stocks are similar and one is cheaper, you’ll probably outperform by buying the cheaper one.”

When investors rely on a simple price and earnings equation, “the odds are you’ll get crushed. It’s too simple. Diversification is the only free lunch in the investment world,” notes Franklin, a Concord, Massachusetts, resident who regards writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as heroes.

“If you diversify by stock and build a multifaceted approach, it gives you something to rely on when value is getting crushed,” Franklin opines. Although he does rely on data, he acknowledges that “sometimes it doesn’t work.”

Acadian’s Global Managed Volatility Equity fund, which oversees $9.8 billion, has been, despite its name, steady. It returned 7.7% in 2016, 6.6% in 2015, and 8.8% in 2014.

Acadian has a partnership with Microsoft to analyze its data. “[Microsoft] believes there may be actionable information in the Bing data with regard to consumer behavior, potential company earnings, and other factors that drive stock prices,” Franklin says. Acadian is turning that data into investment models.

富兰克林冠军“认知多样性”作为管理策略。他追求人才“谁将挑战现状”，经常聘请来自鲜为人知的高校人文专业。富兰克林公开探讨了该公司在员工会议上的策略，鼓励分歧。他说这样做会产生更好的结果。“你围绕桌面和不同观点进行了更多的讨论，”他解释道。

In the future, Franklin expects, Acadian will serve a broader range of investors globally and explore new markets like Latin America. “But we will still be the same firm: client-centric, empirical, bringing experience to analytics.”