Scott Minerd, an outspoken and influential fund manager who was chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, died Wednesday of a heart attack.
Mr Minerd, 63 and a dedicated weightlifter known for bench pressing more than 400 pounds, died during his daily workout, the company said.
Mr. Minerd joined Guggenheim shortly after the company’s founding in 1998.
Guggenheim Chief Executive Mark Walter credited him with designing the organization, systems and processes that helped Guggenheim grow from a startup to a manager with more than $218 billion in assets and 900 employees.
Mr. Minerd served as the public face of the Guggenheim. In this role, he was among the more prominent figures on Wall Street, making frequent television appearances and being active on social media to discuss markets and investments, often in outspoken terms.
“That sound you’re hearing is the Fed breaking something,” he wrote in a note to clients in October, warning that the central bank’s campaign to raise interest rates was causing dislocations in bond and currency markets.
Mr. Minerd was a member of the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an advisor to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Mr. Minerd is survived by his husband Eloy Mendez.
“As a money manager, I look to conventional wisdom as the surest route to underperforming assets,” wrote Mr. Minerd in a biographical summary.
Mr. Minerd grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also took courses at the University of Chicago and described himself as a monetarist.
In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a currency, bond and structured securities trader at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and CS First Boston.
At the age of 37, burned out, he left Wall Street and moved to Los Angeles. “I walked away from extremely large offers on Wall Street,” he told Bloomberg in 2017. “I realized this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for life, it was.” After joining Guggenheim Partners, he worked in an office in Santa Monica, California, overlooking the ocean.
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Mr. Minerd was a conservative willing to take some ideas from the left and seek a middle ground.
In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he targeted elite universities, including the University of Pennsylvania. “These schools have huge endowments, and why not focus their endowments on promoting a cause of essentially free education, or at least education that provides full support to people below a certain income level?” he asked. Mr Minerd said he would not make donations to “bricks and mortar and improving the look of the place” if people who would be qualified to get there could not afford to do so. And of course, more equal access to education would help address some of the issues related to race and poverty.”
Referring to his bulky, bodybuilder physique, he once told a Wall Street Journal reporter that when asked about the “key man” risk at the Guggenheim and what would happen if Mr. Minerd was hit by a truck, his staff replied , would reply, “Do it. You mean what would happen to the truck?”
One of his favorite charities was Union Rescue Mission, which provides food, shelter, education and other services to homeless people in Los Angeles County. Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission, recalled meeting Mr Minerd around 2008 when the Mission was in poor financial shape and at risk of having to sell one of its sites. “He told me that God patted him on the back and told him to do more for others,” Rev. Bales said. Mr. Minerd eventually donated more than $5 million to the mission to allow it to expand its services.
Mr. Minerd was often seen with a rescue dog, named Grace, who would accompany him to the office and on trips.
His work schedule was punitive. “He was up early for East Coast clients and late for his West Coast clients,” said Rev. Bales.
Write to Charley Grant at [email protected] and James R. Hagerty at [email protected]
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