DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Sherman and Sam Lau welcome Ellen Carr, principal and high yield portfolio manager at majority-women-owned Barksdale Investment Management and adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School, to discuss her book on the lack of women in investment management as well as her take on the state of high yield credit. Ms. Carr shares what drove her to coauthoring “Undiversified: The Big Gender Short in Investment Management” with Katrina Dudley (a PM at Franklin Templeton) and what they hope to achieve with the book (2:27). Ms. Carr delves into some of the factors that push women away from a lucrative financial career that offers a nice work-life balance. Among the topics she discusses are how families might inadvertently communicate to children at a very young age that investing is the purview of men (10:21), widening the on-ramp for women at the undergrad and MBA level (14:56), the psychocultural barriers that can keep women from advancing after being hired (21:00) and how employers can cast a wider net (28:57). The trio also reviews the high yield credit sector, with Ms. Carr talking about the lack of public outrage over the pandemic-driven government stimulus that effectively bailed out high yield investors versus the outcry over banker bailouts in 2008 (38:01) and how pandemic-era pressures helped clean up the sector (40:20). This episode was recorded March 15, 2022.
Jeffrey Sherman, DoubleLine’s Deputy Chief Investment Officer, is a thought leader, portfolio manager and public speaker in the industry. Mr. Sherman is a member of DoubleLine’s Fixed Income and Global Asset Allocation committees, and he serves as lead portfolio manager for the firm’s multi-sector and derivative-based strategies. In his role, Mr. Sherman guides the investment teams in developing top-down macro views and collaborative asset allocation processes throughout a market cycle. Additionally, he is a member of DoubleLine’s Executive Management Committee. In 2018, Money Management Executive named Mr. Sherman as one of “10 Fund Managers to Watch” in its yearly special report. Prior to joining DoubleLine in 2009, Mr. Sherman was a Senior Vice President at TCW, where he worked as a portfolio manager and quantitative analyst focused on fixed income and real-asset portfolios. Prior to that, he was a statistics and mathematics instructor at the University of the Pacific and Florida State University. Mr. Sherman taught Quantitative Methods for Level I candidates in the USC/CFALA CFA® Review Program for many years. He holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of the Pacific and an M.S. in Financial Engineering from Claremont Graduate University. Mr. Sherman is a CFA® charterholder.
Mr. Lau joined DoubleLine in 2009. He is a Strategist on the Fixed Income Asset Allocation (FIAA) Committee and a contributing member on the Global Asset Allocation and Macro Committees. Mr. Lau is a Portfolio Manager on DoubleLine’s strategic commodity strategy while working in portfolio management and trading for derivatives-based and multi-asset strategies, including DoubleLine's Shiller Enhanced CAPE®, Shiller Enhanced International CAPE®, Real Estate and Income, and Multi-Asset Trend strategies. He also co-hosts the Sherman Show (Twitter @ShermanShowPod, ShermanShow@Doubleline.com) and Monday Morning Minutes (Twitter @DLineMinutes, Minutes@Doubleline.com) podcasts. Prior to DoubleLine, Mr. Lau was a Vice President at TCW where he worked under Jeffrey Gundlach as a Research Analyst in the Mortgage Group. He holds a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
