Insight into one of our key members and current Vice President of the Melbourne Society:
Kate Misic, CFA
Head of Alternative Investments
Telstra Super
Australia
Had the stars aligned, Kate Misic, CFA, would have been an astronomer. But despite having a bachelor’s degree in math and physics, the mystery of the origin of the universe wasn’t strong enough to pull her into a career in cosmology.
“I found that working with telescopes was boring and it didn’t feel rewarding,” she says. “After that, I studied a financial planning course and I tried financial planning for a few months. But I didn’t enjoy it, so I decided to find an investment analyst job.”
But her location put her at a disadvantage: she lived in Canberra, the Australian capital, while investment firms are concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne.
“There weren’t many places where you get an investment analyst job. I found a firm that was a private equity fund of funds. I was lucky that they were based in Canberra because they had government clients,” she says.
Today, Misic is head of alternative investments at Telstra Super, Australia’s largest corporate super fund, where she manages an A$300 million hedge fund program and runs an A$600 million private equity program. Her job involves identifying world-class hedge fund and private equity managers to manage Telstra Super’s money, building a portfolio that fits a medium return, medium risk criteria, and monitoring the performance of managers that are already investing funds for Telstra Super.
In a sense, Misic’s job is to put the best fund managers in the world through the wringer—asking them hard questions about their investment strategy and performance. Her experience in private equity, and fund manager research and performance analysis at an asset consulting firm prior to joining Telstra Super has proven indispensable.
“I think you should have good performance analysis skills because you really have to dig into the numbers and try to look at it many different ways because managers would always try to present you their performance in the best light,” she says.
In addition, she says having a background in company analysis or stock selection would be advantageous so that you can put yourself in the manager’s shoes and ask the right questions.
“The only portfolio I have ever managed was a fixed-income portfolio, which was semi-passive. As a result of not having stock selection experience myself, I really needed to do extra work to understand what an analyst would be doing. With hedge fund strategies, I have to have a good understanding of the more complex hedge fund strategies and again quantitative skills become important,” she says.
Although Misic has been exposed in a variety of aspects of the investment industry, she says the CFA Program curriculum helped round out everything that she needed to know about manager research and analysis and portfolio construction.
“It allowed me to meet portfolio managers, investment analysts, chief investment officers, and risk managers, and ask tough questions about how they do things and make a judgment call on whether or not that’s best practice in the industry,” she says.
For those who would like to follow a similar career path, Misic says working in an asset consulting firm or multi-asset firm where you get to see many aspects of the industry would be a great place to start and from there, you can follow your strength and end up in the right place.
“A lot of people when they are looking at entering the industry they want to work as investment analysts for the best fund managers. Obviously that’s not always going to happen for everybody,” she says. “I find that all of my experience in my career I bring them to bear when I’m looking at fund managers. Had I not done some of the investment analyst jobs earlier in my career, I wouldn’t be as good in my role as I am today.”