Women in Finance: Three outperforming female investment managers on what's their edge

Many studies, some more recent and also older ones, demonstrate the solid outperformance of female managed funds versus their male counterparts. 

The idea of today's show is to break it down and make it real by presenting you three outperforming female managers on the panel. We discuss how they invest and also try to examine what is behind this outperformance. 

Kim Forrest has had an unusual path that led her to this point – where she started her own asset management firm, Bokeh Capital Management.  Kim’s first career, enabled by a dual degree computer science and math degree, was as a software engineer.  She worked in math-oriented areas – computer aided design and drafting in the world of engineering and then Artificial Intelligence.

When she did her MBA, she was introduced to the topic of finance and was later hired as a sell-side analyst to cover software stocks – in 1999.  Her work at a small regional broker/dealer was recognized nationally several times during her 5 year career, including in 2002 when she was the #2 software analyst in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Street analyst survey.  Her picks in 2001, which was a bad year for software, returned 66%. She transitioned to the buy side in 2005.

Michelle Leung is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of  Xingtai Capital Management. 

Michelle founded Xingtai Capital with the philosophy of investing in  growth with a value overlay. The firm manages Xingtai China, a long only China equity fund. Xingtai China adopts a fundamental, bottom up strategy and has achieved strong outperformance versus the index and ranks top decile amongst peer funds. The firm has emerged as one of leading China funds and a leading woman-owned business. 

Shikha Gupta is based in London where she is the portfolio manager of Astra Asset Management, a specialist credit manager that has consistently delivered outsized return to its investors since inception in 2012. She has received several hedge fund performance awards for the funds she managed. 

Prior to Astra, Shikha successfully managed a very large credit book at Deutsche Bank in London with exposure to variety of complex credit instruments from derivatives such as credit default swaps to various cash investments in US and European mortgaged backed securities.

Hear Kim speak about trends in technology that can benefit investors and listen to her doubts if value investing, the old style that Warren Buffett espoused, ever coming back..
Michelle explains how she has achieved strong outperformance and what she means by "investing in growth with a value overlay". 
Shikha's fund was just listed in Opalesque’s top 50 Consistent Performers and so she will go over her investment thesis that has delivered high returns for the past several years.

We also discussed possible reasons, why, in finance - even on the retail side IRAs run by women outperform - women tend to perform better? 

 And, lastly, is this fact actually recognized and honored by investors?