Joe Frohna, 1492 Capital Management’s founding principal and
portfolio manager of the Growth Strategies and Core Alpha Strategy funds, was a
guest speaker in the AIM program on Friday.
An experienced manager of public
and private funds for institutional and individual investors since 1997; he has
created a Milwaukee-based investment firm that focuses on finding small cap companies with superior growth
characteristics. As he told the students, 1492 deploys a thematic approach in an attempt to
leverage their fundamental research to identify key companies
that will be participating in a particular high growth area of the economy.
Mr. Frohna also talked to the students about micro-cap equity
investing. He discussed his approach to screening and identifying attractive opportunities. In 1997 he became the portfolio manager of the nationally recognized
First American Small Cap Growth Opportunities Fund (formerly the Firstar Small
Cap Growth and Firstar Microcap Fund). His experiences and thoughts about how
to evaluate stocks in the micro-cap space were appreciated by the AIM students.
