5/27/2002, Wall Street Transcript: Excerpt from Interview with Sarat Sethi

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TWST: Please begin by telling our readers about Douglas C. Lane & Associates and your responsibilities there.

Mr. Sethi: We are a registered investment advisory firm located in New York City. We manage common stock and bond portfolios primarily for high net worth individuals and families, but also for some pension plans, foundations and endowments. Our only business is investment management. We are not involved in any other business activity and thus do not have any conflicts of interest. We manage over $1.2 billion of assets. Our clients are located throughout the US as well in several other countries in the world. In the selection of common stocks and bonds for our clients’ portfolios, we focus on our own research. I am one of the four owners of the firm, and my responsibilities include portfolio management and equity and economic analysis. In fact, every portfolio manager in our firm conducts research along with our research analysts. We feel that it is very important for every portfolio manager to engage in research to ensure that the portfolio managers understand firsthand the companies owned by our clients.

TWST: So you do all your own research.

Mr. Sethi: Correct. We have no ties to any other financial firm. Thus, there is no conflict of interest caused by our receiving incentives from other financial firms with “products” or common stocks to sell. Although we receive most of Wall Street’s institutional research, our investment process relies on our own grunt work, and we ask ourselves, “Why do we want to invest in these particular industries? Why do we want to be an owner of this specific company?” This independence, and our reliance on investment management fees from our clients as our only source of revenue, allows our interests to be directly aligned with those of our clients.

TWST: Can you expand on your investment philosophy and approach to investing?

Mr. Sethi: We are long-term investors. We are not market timers. We try to understand long-term trends and then make investments that take advantage of positive trends while avoiding situations that would subject our clients to undue risk. The basic tenet of our firm is the strong belief that successful investment results are derived from the growth of corporations whose common stocks are owned, not from attempts on our part to manipulate capital in the stock market to take advantage of near-term emotional or momentum trends. We diversify our clients’ portfolios by having them own 40-60 companies in many different industries and sectors. Dividend income return is a consideration, but we also invest in companies that offer little or no current income because they are expanding rapidly and need to use their cash to finance growth.

TWST: What is your macro analysis of the information technology sector and what are the companies and the reasons why you’ve selected them?

Mr. Sethi: As I said before, we are strong proponents of the information technology sector. We think at times the market gets too excited about this area and too bearish at other times. A lot of what’s happening now has to do with capital flows. With money flowing from growth funds to value funds, many growth managers have had to sell their technology holdings. Hedge funds are also active in this area and tend to exaggerate price movements both up and down. As we look at it, we think we’re still in the initial innings of the buildout of the Internet. During the dot-com era, a great amount of capital was spent in building out the Internet. As the economy slowed down, there was a lot of excess bandwidth that just was not being utilized. Eventually we’re going to catch up to it with new applications and increased amounts of data usage. On the semiconductor side, we like Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN). Over the last few years, Texas Instruments has restructured itself and has become very lean. TI plays in multiple spaces and has a large market share in DSPs for wireless, cable modems, and DSL. I’m actually going to go see TI and spend a couple of days with them in Dallas, to further understand their strategy and where they’re going.