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Thinking Aloud is a podcast series where Brown Advisory’s investment professionals unpack an idea that has recently shaped their perspective. Each episode features an informal conversation with a Brown Advisory expert about their insight, gathered from a book or article, a conversation, speaker, conference, podcast, compelling data point, or even a personal event. At its heart, the podcast invites you to explore how broad insights can challenge assumptions, deepen understanding, and inspire more intentional decision‑making. We hope each episode encourages you to stay curious, reflect on what influences your own thinking, and remain open to learning from the world around you.
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The views expressed are those of the author and Brown Advisory as of the date referenced and are subject to change at any time based on market or other conditions. These views are not intended to be and should not be relied upon as investment advice and are not intended to be a forecast of future events or a guarantee of future results. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance and you may not get back the amount invested. The information contained herein has been prepared from sources believed reliable but is not guaranteed by us as to its timeliness or accuracy, and is not a complete summary or statement of all available data. This piece is for informational purposes only.
The information provided in this material is not intended to be and should not be considered to be a recommendation or suggestion to engage in or refrain from a particular course of action or to make or hold a particular investment or pursue a particular investment strategy, including whether or not to buy, sell, or hold any of the securities mentioned. It should not be assumed that investments in such securities have been or will be profitable. To the extent specific securities are mentioned, they have been selected by the author on an objective basis to illustrate views expressed in the commentary and do not represent all of the securities purchased, sold or recommended for advisory clients.
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Transcription
Hello, I'm Carey Buxton, a partner at Brown Advisory, and I'd like to welcome you to Thinking Aloud, a Brown Advisory podcast about the ideas that change how investors think and why that matters. The quality of investment outcomes is driven by the decisions behind them. This podcast looks upstream at the ideas and experiences that shape how those decisions are made. We hope these conversations spark reflection, encourage new ways of thinking, and remind us that there's always more to learn.
Hello listeners and welcome to the third episode of Thinking Aloud. I'm Harry Jebb and I work on the business development team here at Brown Advisory. I'm pleased to be joined by Ryan Myerberg, portfolio manager on our global fixed income team.
Ryan, I wanted to start with congratulations and perhaps commiserations at the same time on the football this year. I know you and your two boys are Arsenal fans and after almost 20 years and more recently a few years of petering out, what has this season meant to you personally?
Thanks, Harry. It’s been an absolutely incredible spring season at my house, you know Arsenal finally winning after 22 years, and the New Yorker Nicks finally winning after 53 years, but in terms of the Arsenal. It's been an amazing year, I think made even better to enjoy it with my boys. You know, when you go for a long period of time, when things don't really go your way, it becomes a bit of a challenge. And then to... Be so close over a three-year period and then get over the hump, it's pretty remarkable. And I spent a lot of time actually kind of talking through it with my boys about the effort and what goes into winning, how do you deal with losing, the ups and downs. And this was an up and down year, but to kind of get to that final place and to win and to share with my boys was really special. But yeah, I think there's just so many interesting things you can take away from sport in that context, you know, and with young boys who are sort of just learning it now and going through it now. I don't want them to expect that this is always going to be like that because we know how this thing goes, but it was actually a really, really special year.
Well, I know you're an avid runner with something like six marathons in the last five years, is it? But what many people probably don't know about you is that you were a very accomplished, you won a national championship with the University of Virginia, then went on to win a European championship representing England. And I think sport is real resonance when it comes to investing and building high-performing teams, which is something you know very well.
What lessons from competing in high-level sporting environments have you carried into investing?
Well, I mean, there's so many parallels, as I said. I mean, the first is that it's hard and it's humbling and you have to suffer, you know, physically in sport, mentally as well. And you learn, I think going through that, that it is really the effort that makes the outcome and the ability to achieve something. That outcome when you have a group of individuals who focus less on themselves and on the collective and you accomplish something together is really, really special. And, you know, I was reading this really interesting thing about graphs and working hard. It's actually out of an AI piece with this idea that, you know, you can use AI and it just makes everything easier for you. And that the concern is that you just don't really know how to put in the effort because it's so easy. And that it's sort of linked to this research piece and that actually, yeah. Your brain physically changes with effort, but not just effort. It's the suffering. You know, it is the friction, the frustration, this, you know, have these moments of wanting to quit. But when you work through that, you physiologically actually change. And I think that's something that's really, really fascinating that whether it's sport or it's investing, it can be really, really difficult. But when you pull people together to accomplish something, it's whether it's trying to win a championship in whatever sport you play or it's the outcomes for your clients and you achieve it. It's really, really remarkable. And just going back, you know, as a father, I spent a lot of time talking to my kids just about the effort because that is the only thing you can control. You can't really control the outcomes. And it's the same in investing. It is about the work you put in. And, you know, being humble and grinding together to try to achieve outcomes. And sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. But those are the linkages between sport and investing that I find so interesting. And I say this all the time to our team, say to our clients that investing, it is sport in a way because you have this scoreboard that you look at every single day. Are you winning and are you losing? And our job as investors is to provide the best outcomes we can for our clients. And so focusing on that scoreboard and trying to outperform the market, our peer group, delivering on the outcomes our clients need. I mean, that is all rooted in focusing less on the individual and focusing more on team. And that's how we've always thought about building teams in the past. And here at Brown Advisory, it's just making it a collective where it's all about the outcome and not about the individual.
Yeah. Taking a step back, you manage an unconstrained bond fund. So the remit's broad, your environment changes quickly, and markets rarely play out as expected. What do you look for when building an investment team that can handle that kind of unpredictability?
Well, I think first it's about composition of team. You know, when you think about what we do, which is, as you mentioned, this really broad remit, and it's a huge world. When you think about what we can invest in from a geographic perspective, from an asset class perspective, you need a team around you supporting you as a portfolio manager that has a unique skillset. Each of these individuals that each can contribute really focus on their area of expertise, but not in a silo in the context of, okay, we are a collective, we are a group, and we need to provide this outcome for clients. And so I think what we really focus on when we build teams are finding people who are aligned with the idea that it's not about oneself, it's about the team. That's first and foremost. But, you know, there's a few books that I've read in the past about team. And you learn a lot sort of going through it yourself, you know, when you play sport or, you know, when you're learning the ropes as an early investor from the people that are your coaches or your mentors about team. And you try to augment that with ideas from coaches. The past from other people and books. There are two books that I've read in the past. I've actually reread one because it's about to be the 250th anniversary of the United States, which is near and dear to my heart. It's called Team Arrivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She wrote about when Abraham Lincoln became president, how he created his cabinet to all the people supporting him as president. And his focus is on bringing in people that were in the title of the book, team of rivals, people who had different views. In some cases, people who were running against him, you know, for the nomination to become president. All this idea that it's not about creating an echo chamber. It's about having people who have a different way of thinking, that have different views on the world, different experiences in terms of how they came up as an investor, their individual backgrounds. And when you create, I think that diversity of views and individuals, all with the idea that each of those people can bring something different to the team in terms of skillset, in terms of outlook, but that all buy into this idea of the collective, you make yourself more resilient, more flexible, and with a willingness to be able to challenge each other to navigate what can be a very, very uncertain world. And we are faced every single day with things that are changing. That to me is really important. And in the past, when Colby, Chris and I built a team with Janice Henderson, we were really thinking about bringing people that were different that could support us. Here at Brown Advisory, it's been the same thing. We're surrounded by really talented people with different skill sets, different experiences who are all focused on one singular objective, which is to provide the performance and outcomes that our clients need.
The other book that I've read in the past that really influenced how I thought about team was written by a guy called John Wooden. And so for a non-American listener, John Wooden was a basketball coach at the University of California, Los Angeles, back in the middle of 20th century, and won seven national championships in a row. But he was this very calm and composed guy on the sideline, which when you look at most coaches and managers today on the touchline of football, and you'd speak about Mikel Arteta, great energy, but you know, all these guys, it's always this very, very relaxed because he had this idea of a pyramid of principles and foundationally was really just about loyalty, cooperation, enthusiasm, industriousness, friendship. If you can solve for that and with all the other things that go into this pyramid, the idea of effort built on this foundational principles of just being a team, then you can have the outcomes that you want and then you can compete. And I think about that every day with our team, which is, you know, we have this foundation of loyalty and trust. And with that comes the ability to challenge each other. And that's really important in terms of what we do to have anyone on the team be able to say to me or anybody else, look, I hear what you're saying, but I have a different view. And let's challenge that. Let's stress test our assumptions in terms of how we build portfolios and take views.
Can you maybe unpack that further? I mean, you mentioned challenge, flexibility and sort of talent of the team, but given how broad your remit is, they obviously have to have real responsibility and agency. Can you maybe sort of try and help bring to life and explain how the team's different inputs can come together to shape final portfolio decisions and positioning?
Well, I think we're going through that right now. It's June of 2026, and we are in the throes of this existential moment in the Middle East with this conflict in Iran and what it means for energy markets, etc. It is incredibly impactful in terms of the macro environment. And there's so many different moving parts. And what I have found really interesting is that as we sit down as a team, we talk about this scenario, what it means for markets and outcomes, that all of these different members of the team are bringing their experience and their specialties to the table in terms of helping us to decipher and to understand what's happening. So, for example, we have an analyst who has spent a lot of time in energy markets and really understands the plumbing of how strategic petroleum reserves work. They're basically big salt caverns in, say, America that are filled with oil, and you have to pump water in to draw the oil out. And there's a limit to how much you can take out before the water starts to break down the salt in the caverns, which oil doesn't do. And so trying to understand these nuances of how countries draw down reserves, and also analysts who are talking about the pass through to plastics and other derivatives of oil, what it means for prices and potentially inflation. And that feeds up to how we think about monetary policy for central banks. And will they hike rates? Will they not? Will it be a shock to growth? So you have all these different people who are not necessarily focused on the macro all the time, but that have these very unique skill sets in terms of understanding sectors and industries like energy and consumers and chemicals and plastics that can help us really understand with their views and their experience to kind of pull all those pieces together to navigate, which is one of these moments that feels very, very existential. And I've said this to investors a lot over the last decade. Call it three to four months, which is you have these moments of time. And a mentor of mine told me this. He's like, look, every year in macro investing, you might have one or two big themes that you have to get right. But once every five to 10 years, you have these existential moments that change everything. And I think back over the last 25 years that I've been doing this kind of dot-com bubble, GFC, European sovereign crisis, COVID, And here we are faced with another one of these sort of existential moments. So we have to get it right, but we also have to utilize all this different input in order to really have a view of where we're going and then how we position portfolios to try to take advantage of it.
So with a top-down approach, you have to put a clear view on the table, which takes a high level of conviction. Especially in moments that can feel almost existential for markets, as you've just mentioned. How do you deal with the pressure of making those calls in those situations when the answer is uncertain and the consequences are meaningful?
This is the definition of the role as a portfolio manager. Your job is to assimilate all this information, to separate the signal from the noise, to utilize all the resources that you have around you, and to make, as you mentioned, conviction calls on where the market's going to go and then how we position to take advantage of that. And I think it is about making a call and it's also about having conviction. And that is really a team approach. You know, there are three of us who manage a portfolio together, been doing this together for a long time. And we sit down and we really start to put all the cards down on the table and say, you know, these are the different scenarios that could happen in these situation or any situation. Probability weight those scenarios and then make a decision. And it's hard. I think being an investor, you have to sometimes be comfortable with being uncomfortable because things can change very quickly. Your thesis can break. You're not always going to get it right. And so part of it is about having a call. Part of it's about having conviction. Part of it is about managing your risk, which is really important, especially in fixed income. We talk a lot about the asymmetry of our asset class, where your upside's relatively capped. Your downside can be very significant. And so you have this sort of multifaceted approach to making a call based on the level of your conviction and then managing that risk. But that is ultimately the brief of what we do. It is, to me, the most intellectually stimulating job you could possibly have. You know, when you are asked to understand politics and economics and psychology and all these different things. Now I'm spending a lot of time on psychology. Tech and AI, which is uncharted territory for me. I mean, all these things keep you just hungry for more. And it's really our role to just kind of distill that down into a view, as you said, in a level of conviction and then express it in portfolios.
It sounds incredibly exciting as long as you can handle that pressure. Time horizons. So we all know time horizons are central to all investing. In our equity strategies, the benefit of our partnership structure allows us to take a longer term view than our peers, which can be a real advantage. In fixed income, though, you have to think across several time horizons at once. You've got your strategic view, the cycle, central banks, credit spreads, liquidity, the next data print, to name a few, all which operate on different time scales. How do you balance that when building the portfolio?
I think there's maybe two ways to answer that question. And the first is really understanding what our strategy and strategies are meant to do in our clients' portfolios. Because that, to me, it really defines how you think about time horizons and style. When I think about what our strategy as a fixed income strategy is meant to do in our clients' portfolios as one building block amongst many building blocks, it is meant to be a stability asset. It is meant to be a complement, sometimes a counterbalance to stability. Equity risk. And that sometimes can be lost by managers in terms of like this constant focus on like, what is the role my strategy is meant to do in clients portfolio? So that's the first thing that we have to focus on. But the second is time horizons. And you're right, the way that you express views in your portfolio and the risk that you take, do play out over different time horizons. And you mentioned sort of strategic view. I mean, for us, we've always thought about it in the context of where is the world going to be over the next six and 12 months? And so to do that, we sit down as a team, not just my co-portfolio managers and I, but also the entirety of the team every December. And we take a look at all the major developed economies around the world, major emerging countries around the world. And we think about growth and inflation, monetary and fiscal policy, all these different factors. And then try to assess where we think each of those economies are in the economic cycle. And then get a sense of kind of where is the global economy going at that point in time. And then we look at all these different asset classes that we have available to us, whether it's interest rates or it's credit, emerging markets, others. Look, a lot of valuations, of course, because that is sort of the lifeblood of what we do as investors in terms of are we getting paid to take the risk that's in front of us? And then when we build our portfolio based on that view of the world of where we think we are in the cycle and the different outcomes and the probability weighting of those outcomes, We expect that to play out over the next six and 12 months. And you really shouldn't be chopping and changing that too often. Now, of course, things happen. You know, Russia invades Ukraine, and now we have this thing going on in the Middle East. And you have to be willing to go back to the table and really talk about, you know, what has changed or has anything completely changed our view of the world. Sometimes it does. But those views typically will sort of play out over six and 12 months. But, and this is sort of very unique to what we do in fixed income versus, as you mentioned, our equity strategy was take a much longer term view, five, 10 years in terms of the compounding of capital with individual businesses. You know, there are these things that are happening all the time. You have central bank meetings, you have elections. And we can be very tactical in terms of how do we tilt portfolios for shorter term opportunities that can be very creative to portfolios. This kind of real time alpha that exists in our marketplace, whether it's in currencies or interest rates or in credit that we can use to sort of augment the overall returns of the portfolio. So we do have a multifaceted two lens approach to time horizons. But all with the idea of going back to the sense of like, what is this strategy meant to do? never really losing sight of, you know, we have to play that really important role that fixed income is meant to do in clients' asset allocation mixes in the context of sitting alongside not just equities, but I think, you know, increasingly as you look at asset allocation portfolios, it's not just equities, but private credit and private equity and, you know, all sorts of different risk assets that are in clients' portfolios now. And so, you know, In our view, you know, fixed income needs to be different. It needs to have different levers for performance that can be very complementary. And as I mentioned, it can also be a counterbalance or sort of negatively correlated to those risks as you go through a cycle over the course of a five to seven year period.
Ryan, thank you very much for your time today.
I appreciate it. My pleasure.
Thank you for listening to Thinking Aloud. Please subscribe to hear more conversations like this.