Inside Active by Bloomberg Intelligence

Brandon Nelson, senior vice president and portfolio manager at Calamos Investments, explains his fundamental-momentum approach to small- and mid-cap growth investing. He discusses finding sustainable growth that markets underestimate, researching management teams, letting winners run and enforcing sell discipline. Nelson also explores valuation, portfolio construction and why small caps still offer a broad field of opportunity.

Shelly Antoniewicz, chief economist at the Investment Company Institute, explores active management’s changing landscape. She discusses why active and index strategies can complement each other, what fund flows reveal, and why ETFs are surging through advice channels. Mutual funds’ resilience in retirement plans, active ETF growth, fee compression, shifting adviser compensation, and the future of fund selection also take center stage.

Alan Wilson, a Capital Group portfolio manager with more than 30 years of investment experience, explains why growth can hide in unexpected places. He discusses cyclically rebounding “coiled springs,” valuation, shrinking competitive moats, and research built around a three-year view. He also explores Capital Group’s multi-manager model, overlooked businesses, concentrated indexes, and infrastructure constraints that could fuel future opportunities.

Tim Paulin, senior vice president at Touchstone Investments, specializes in researching and evaluating investment managers. He explains how Touchstone searches for talent, tests whether performance reflects genuine skill, and uses holdings to verify a manager’s process. They also discuss active-management standards, handling underperformance, avoiding performance-chasing, and what makes an enduring investment partner.

Tom Winmill, president of the Midas funds and a fundamental portfolio manager, explains why free-cash-flow growth and returns on capital matter more than market stories. He discusses valuation and margin of error, concentrated portfolios, letting winners compound, strict sell rules, higher interest rates and why he is waiting for clearer evidence of durable AI economics.

James Davolos, portfolio manager of the Horizon Kinetics Inflation Beneficiaries ETF, specializes in long-term analysis of real assets and capital-light businesses. He discusses why business models can matter more than asset classes, the appeal of royalties and exchanges, valuation of scarce assets, mispriced lumpy cash flows, and how inflation-focused equities may complement traditional portfolios.

Henry Jim, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence who tracks European ETF launches and trends, discusses the rapid expansion of active ETFs in Europe. He highlights issuer-led surges and small, concentrated launches. He covers structural hurdles like fragmented distribution and cultural barriers, plus channels that could broaden use and why fixed income and solutions-based ETFs may fit best.

Graham Day, partner and CIO at Innovator, builds derivative-based and defined-outcome ETF strategies. Bryon Lake, global co-head of third-party wealth at GSAM, leads wealth solutions and product innovation. They discuss outcome-focused active management, growth of derivative and defined-outcome ETFs, how ETFs enable active access, advisor education to demystify option-based payoffs, and untapped fixed-income ETF innovation.

Amit Wadhwaney, co-founding partner of Moerus Capital Management and manager of the Moerus Worldwide Value Fund, focuses on global asset-based deep-value investing. He discusses valuing conservatively estimated assets and balance-sheet survivability. He explains distinguishing temporary setbacks from permanent damage. He covers sourcing opportunities from market dislocations and treating risk as permanent loss of business value.

Michael Ervolini, author of Skill Versus Luck and analyst of decision-based portfolio analytics, explains why outcome metrics mislead. He discusses focusing on buys, sells and sizing to separate repeatable judgment from chance. Conversation touches on behavioral bias, counterfactual portfolios, AI’s role, and how better decision analytics could reshape manager selection.