About Steve Smith, CFA

ABOUT OUR FOUNDER: Stephen Smith, CFA

I spent the early part of my career working for NASA in the Lunar Landing Program.  At NASA, I learned the importance of any team having a clearly established, well-understood, universally agreed upon goal for achieving a mission.  This experience has profoundly shaped the way we think about investing and our approach to working with clients here at Smith Group.

In building this firm, I have focused on ensuring that everyone on the investment team is pulling together in the same direction toward the same goal.  Smith Group’s goal is to be an industry leader in producing the highest returns per unit of risk.  We strive to achieve that goal by finding companies that will grow faster than expected in a very stable fashion.

After my career at NASA, I was involved in an academic study in the late 1970s at the University of North Carolina seeking to determine which components of a company are most associated in generating positive excess returns.  From the start, we noticed that if one can find companies that grow faster than expected on a sustainable basis and own them early in their growth trajectory, one can capture positive, stable excess returns.

It was on these principles that I founded Smith Group in 1995, and more than 25 years later we continue to apply them consistently to our portfolios.  Instead of taking an “either-or” approach to investing, my time at NASA allowed me to observe the merits of a process combining both the efficiency of technology along with the wisdom of human experience.  Additionally, I learned that when failure is not an option, one must be obsessed with managing risk.