The next instalment of our Rising Stars series sees Nutmeg portfolio manager Bolanle Onifade speak to ETF Stream about her switch from software to fund selection and how this inspires a style agnostic investment approach.
Onifade began her career at JP Morgan Chase in 2015, before shifting to the firm’s asset management arm and making the move to robo-adviser subsidiary Nutmeg last year.
How did you get into fund selection?
I actually have a background in computer science and artificial intelligence – I studied that at the University of Nottingham – and then I joined JP Morgan nearly nine years ago as a technologist. I spent five years in software engineering, covering rates technology, convertibles and eventually derivatives.
While I was working as a software engineer for the derivatives desk, the head of the business, Dan McNeil, asked me if I wanted to be a portfolio manager working in the business which I eventually said yes to.
I did that for a couple of years before moving over to Nutmeg as a portfolio manager as well. I did not really have a plan to become a portfolio manager or fund selector. It just sort of happened but it is not something I regret.
What is your role within your team?
Nutmeg is primarily a top-down, multi-asset portfolio manager. In my role as a PM I get involved in the day-to-day decision-making for all our portfolios.
That is everything from coming up with trade ideas, rigorously challenging those ideas and down to implementation of those ideas and seeing them go down to the trading desk.
I pay very close attention to shifting macro and market dynamics and how that might affect our existing positions, as well as running products that leverage technology so that we can improve our investment process.
I work as a portfolio manager and my boss Pacome Breton is the head PM. Together we lead that entire process.
What kind of investor are you?
Sometimes in industry, people classify themselves as either a value, growth or momentum investor. But one merit of having a tech background is being quite style agnostic.
I evaluate the merits of trade ideas based off of the impact on our client portfolios, on the rationale, the length of the runway of returns and the asymmetry of returns.
Whereas some trade ideas might have merit on a value basis others may have merit due to shifts in consumer needs or say on the fixed income side, shifting expectations for rates.
I would say I am agnostic and that ties back to my tech background – focusing on the rationale over the particular style of an investment.
Who are your biggest role models?
I get a lot of inspiration from the strength I see in people on a day-to-day basis, whether that is the strength to power through a very difficult project, juggling life and work, or to improve and strive for all that you are capable of.
Naturally, I have been influenced quite a lot by my own family and the strength I have seen from my sisters and my mother.
There are also a couple of people who have shown the determination to do what others might have thought impossible, such as Serena Williams or Jim Simmons.
Simmons was the founder of Renaissance Technologies and ended up deploying statistical techniques to investment when nobody else was thinking about it and persevering through periods where those techniques might have failed.
Now, Renaissance Technology is probably one of the top investment houses in the world, so that is worthy of a lot of respect.
What do you do when you are not managing portfolios?
I dabble a little in an app which aims to bring together my love of eating and software engineering. A kind of one-stop-shop for eating out.
It aims to move away from lists and shows you content by the community and more structured searches. It appeals to the side of my brain that likes structured data - filtering for specific needs quickly rather than sifting through lists of things.
What do you like about ETFs and what further development is needed?
Given Nutmeg’s clientele, the aspect of ETFs I really enjoy is the democratised access to sophisticated strategies at low cost.
There are two gaps to cross as a retail investor – education and access. While there is a wealth of educational material out there, access gaps still require quite a bit of work and ETFs go a long way to solving that problem.
As for future development, we at Nutmeg have a thematic range and it would be great to have more granularity.
There are plenty of clean energy ETFs and even some addressing subsectors such as wind and solar, but the direction of travel we would like to see is towards disaggregation. Thematic ETFs enabling us to target individual regions or parts of a theme’s value chain, for example.
Take semiconductors, for example, there are plenty of ETFs that encompass every part of the value chain – from fab manufacturers to designers – whereas we might like to target certain parts where we see greater upside potential.
