On Monday, March 2, 2020, John Malooly, CFA, paid his annual
visit to Marquette’s AIM program
For well over a decade, John Malooly, a Marquette College of
Business graduate and portfolio manager at Wasatch Advisors, has addressed the
students in the AIM program
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| John Malooly, PM of the Wasatch Ultra Growth Fund |
On March 2nd, John Malooly, CFA, paid his annual visit to
Marquette’s AIM program. This is John’s 13th year returning to his alma mater
to address the students in the program.
John graduated from Marquette’s College of Business
Administration in 1990 and is now in his 22nd year at Wasatch
Advisors, which is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the Lead Portfolio
Manager for the Wasatch Ultra Growth Fund – and he is also an analyst and co-PM
on other Wasatch small cap funds.
The Wasatch Ultra Growth (WAMCX) has been an incredibly performer.
John’s mutual fund excels in selecting small-cap growth stocks.
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| John Malooly visited the AIM program again in 2020 |
AIM director, David Krause said, “John’s approach at Wasatch
has been based on fundamental bottom-up analysis which is consistent with what
our AIM students learn. His class presentation that included numerous examples
helped to reinforce the concepts and approach to investment analysis that we
employ in the AIM program. John’s visit is always one of the highlights of the
semester and it is always great to have John back on campus again.”
John Malooly has been a Portfolio Manager for the Wasatch Ultra Growth Fund since 2012. He was
previously a Portfolio Manager for the Wasatch Micro Cap Value Fund. He joined Wasatch Advisors in 1997 as a research
analyst on the Small Cap Growth Fund.
From 1999 to 2003, he worked as a Senior Research Analyst on the Micro
Cap Fund.
John is a Wisconsin native from the Green Bay area who
enjoys the outdoors and spending time with his family. Krause added, “John is a
great friend of the AIM program and an excellent resource – I know the students
enjoyed having lunch with him and getting the chance to talk stocks.”
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| Incredible performance! |
John’s fund has been a perennial outperformer of the benchmark
(Russell 2000 Growth Index). In 2019 his fund was the award winner of Investor’s
Business Daily Best Mutual Funds for U.S. Diversified Stock, Growth and Small
Cap categories.
One of the students asked John how his fund has been able to
outperform so consistently? And always humble, John replied that he worked with
a great team and that their focus is on companies with high-quality management
teams and solid business models. He tries to find companies that are disrupting
and not being disrupted.
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| John Malooly has visited the AIM program nearly every year since 2005 |
Krause stated, “This should sound familiar to students who
have passed through the AIM program over the years. We always require students
to write a term paper on innovations and disruptions that are occurring within
their sectors. And like John and his team, we are trying to find companies
across sectors that are going to benefit from advances in technology and changes
to industry models.”
The beauty of John and his team’s approach is that they are
long-term investors and are not focused on the next quarterly earnings call.
They invest with a three to five year horizon and not three to five days or
weeks. “It is always a pleasure to host John,” added Krause. “He is the type of
investor we need – the focus should be on a firm’s long-run earnings growth
potential and not some short-term piece of information. He’s a superstar!”
