Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva: Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace, founder and CIO of a Chicago-based hedge fund startup called Shorepath Capital Management, ventured into the entrepreneurial world after more than 12 years at AllianceBernstein as a US Large Cap Growth Portfolio Manager and Team Leader, and 15 years at JPMorgan as a managing director.

His long-biased equity fund, Shorepath Opportunity Partners LP, was started in February 2013 and has been running on internal capital so far; it will launch officially as soon as external capital is raised. It returned approximately 39% (gross) in 2013.

Scott hopes to combine the long term, research-based stock selection skills from the long-only world with the unconstrained investing techniques and risk management skills from the hedge fund world. He aims to make thoughtful investment decisions, both long and short, irrespective of artificial divisions of asset class, style box, market cap, geography and above all, investment techniques.

Down with Balkanisation

The investment management business has become far too Balkanized, Wallace states, between long-only and alternative factions. Now is the time for a change.

"For quite a long time now, the investment management world has been separated into ever smaller boxes, from which you were not supposed to deviate," he tells Opalesque. "I understand how that came to pass. Now that the financial crisis is well behind us, a nimbler approach to investing, one with fewer constraints, is going to be the one that serves investors best. That is what I am doing with my fund."

The convergence trend within the investment management industry is indeed what he is trying to be part of. It was too chopped up before and "others and myself h......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.