Podcast: Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith
Season 6 Episode 1: Leading the Way: The Secret to Building a Quality Portfolio with Haverford Vice President Eileen Chambers
Host: Hank Smith, Director, Head of Investment Strategy at Haverford Trust
Guest: Eileen Chambers, Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Haverford Trust  

Title:  Leading the Way: The Secret to Building a Quality Portfolio with Haverford Vice President Eileen Chambers 

Description: 

Join host Hank Smith on this episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights as he chats with Eileen Chambers, Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Haverford Trust. With over three decades of experience in the financial services industry, Eileen boasts firsthand knowledge and expertise when it comes to building and growing an investment portfolio.  

During this episode, you will hear about balancing portfolios, assessing risk, and the value of knowing your investment goals and risk tolerance. Eileen also shares advice for aspiring professionals in the investment management field. Don’t miss this engaging conversation packed with expertise and industry perspectives! 

To learn more about The Haverford Trust Company, please visit https://haverfordquality.com/  

Episode Transcript: 

Maxine Cuffe: You’re listening to Speaking of Quality, Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. A podcast by the Haverford Trust Company on speaking of quality, Hank chats with authors, influencers and wealth management experts to bring a sense of clarity and calm to the complexity and stress of personal finance. And now here’s your host Hank Smith.  

Hank Smith: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights. I’m your host Hank Smith, Director and Head of Investment Strategy at the Haverford Trust Company. On this podcast we explore topics ranging from quality investing, retirement resilience, stock market trends, estate planning, behavioral psychology, and more. Our guest today is Eileen Chambers, Vice President and Portfolio Manager at the Haverford Trust Company. Eileen is an accomplished investment professional with more than 30 years of experience in the finance industry and has been an instrumental part of the Haverford team since joining in 1991. In this episode, we’ll discuss Eileen’s approach to portfolio management, her career journey and advice she has for others and how her trust differentiates itself in the industry. So, let’s dive in and learn more about my colleague Eileen. Eileen, welcome to the show.  

Eileen Chambers: Thank you so much.  

Hank Smith: I have to point out the first Haverford teammate I’m doing a podcast with. So, that shows you how much high regard I have for you. Eileen, isn’t it interesting that we both joined the Haverford Trust Company 32 years ago in 1991? It’s rare these days for people to stay with one company for as long as we have. When you joined, I knew you were right out of college. How did you find Haverford? And what has led you to stay here for all these years? 

Eileen Chambers: In 1991 well, it was characterized as the worst job market in 20 years for new college graduates. So, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet with the leadership at Haverford. I was brought to Haverford by headhunters, so it was just kind of dumb luck, really. But I was really fortunate to receive an offer and what made me come to Haverford was really that sense of knowledge, ethics and caring. It was absolutely why I wanted to begin my career at Haverford. But what I can say 32 years later is it really remains the same. However, I would say there’s probably two things I would add to that, that I didn’t realize at the time, it was the opportunities that would come to me and the evolution of the firm how we grew in those 32 years was something fantastic. 

Hank Smith: Now, I’m speaking for myself. It’s really quite simple why I’ve been here for 32 years. I love what I do. I love the people I work with, and the company treats everyone very well, almost as if we’re family. So, you’ve worked in every area of this organization. What was your first role at Haverford? And how did you get to your current role as a portfolio manager? 

Eileen Chambers: Like I said, I can speak to the opportunities at Haverford. I started out in operations as a portfolio accountant back in 1991. And I guess a message for those starting out in their new careers is to be persistent and stick to the things even if you don’t love exactly what you’re doing in every moment because my first few weeks, I stapled, which was really unattractive to me as a college graduate as you can imagine. But my wonderful mother told me you will do whatever they ask you to do, and I did. And it led to such an incredible career. So really stick to what you’re asked to do and do it with grace. I think it is a really good lesson for everyone, regardless of whether you think you’re above it or not. But that was I think an entree into the operations of the firm, which led me to other opportunities. And I used those opportunities when I had some downtime to volunteer to other portfolio managers when they needed help with anything. And that really introduced me to, I suppose my lifelong mentor Joe McLaughlin who is now the CEO, was not the CEO at the time, but he really created a path for me to work with all sorts of departments at Haverford, including operations, trading, , Investment Officer, and finally in 2001, he invited me to co-manage accounts with him. And that led to me wanting or working with clients independently of him several years later, 

Hank Smith: That’s a wonderful story and it’s a terrific message that should resonate with anyone getting into the workplace coming out of college. Thank you. During your tenure as a portfolio manager, you’ve worked through and experienced firsthand a number of crises starting with the tech wreck of the late 90s-Early 00s, the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and, most recently, the healthcare COVID crisis over the past several years. How do you manage your clients and, as importantly, yourself through these tumultuous periods? 

Eileen Chambers: Good question and to look back at these crises, in the moment it felt like the world was going to end and it certainly didn’t. So, each one of them was an incredible learning lesson for me and for everyone in the world. 2001 was the year I started in portfolio management and that was the year of the tech wreck as you mentioned. I think the best way to describe how I managed through that was listening, really listening to my clients because their worries were real, and no one knew how it was going to play out. And really my job was to listen, to guide, to go back to the fundamentals of that we were investing in companies that do the right thing and that have been through these crises before and really come back to fundamentals and become their partner. I would say in hindsight, it was probably the best time to become a portfolio manager because I got to speak to clients every day, all day long. I really got to know them. I really got to know their risk tolerance. It’s not in up markets that you find a client’s risk tolerance. It’s in down markets where you really get to know that and that is such an important key to managing assets with the client for the long run. Really understanding what type of risk, they can take and that’s when you find out. I found that to be that to be a really challenging time in 2001 and 2002, but it probably taught me more than I could have had in a very fun up market like the roaring late 90s. 

Hank Smith: How did you manage your stress levels? Because, speaking personally, these are really stressful events for anyone dealing with clients and with other people’s money. 

Eileen Chambers: Sure, I think that that’s where the culture comes in at Haverford. You have colleagues that all have an open-door policy and that you share ideas, that you share difficult situations with. I remember sitting down with you in early 2001 talking to you about certain situations and how you would handle them and what is the best position that I could put clients in. But there’s many of us now that I go to for that type of consultative advice and there’s no judgment. We’re here to be partners. We don’t compete, and I think that is an interesting part about Haverford. We compete externally, but we do not compete internally. And that makes us incredibly special. 

Hank Smith: Yes, I remember that conversation very well. And I think I said regardless of how many years of experience, you will always experience anxiety, even a little bit of fear. And that’s just part of human nature and part of the business that we’re in. 

Eileen Chambers: I still get nervous sometimes and that’s okay. I think it gives me the energy to really deliver for my clients in real time.  

Hank Smith: As a portfolio manager, Eileen, how do you get client relationships, develop client relationships, and manage investment portfolios? 

Eileen Chambers: In terms of bringing in new business I have been really very fortunate in referrals being my main source of business. And perhaps that’s the way that most of my business is built. We have a terrific reputation, great advertising and marketing. But really, our clients are our biggest and largest ambassadors. So that’s been, I think, very, very fortunate that I’ve had that path. But the way that I have worked with clients over the last 20 years of doing this, is there’s no one way to do it. I think I mentioned this earlier, you really do have to listen first, because no matter how many clients we have at Haverford, I would venture to say that no two of them have earned their money the same way or view their money exactly the same way. So listening is such an important part of what we do both in investment management and importantly in wealth management. And especially, I would say over the last five to seven years we’ve introduced financial planning and wealth planning at Haverford. And that has been, in my sense, a game changer. We really have very broad conversations with clients about what’s important to them and what they need from us. And we’re able to really pull in experts out from outside of Haverford as well as inside of Haverford to give them the best advice possible. In my opinion, you can drive down any Main Street in any town, you’re going to see shingles everywhere. What we do, it’s hard perhaps has been commoditized. But how we deliver it is everything and our delivery mechanism at Haverford, I would venture to say, is superior to anyone out there. 

Hank Smith: So, there’s a theme I’ve heard so far about your career and the success you’ve had in every part of your career here at Haverford is to have communication internally with colleagues and communication with the clients. That seems to be one real key to your success. 

Eileen Chambers: I agree with that. Communication but listening especially. And for someone who’s in this business, I think we have the reputation at times of thinking we know everything, and we don’t. So, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t learn something, and you learn more by listening.  

Hank Smith: But you can’t listen unless you pick up the phone and start communicating. In your opinion, what are some of the mistakes that clients make? And how do you go about helping clients avoid these mistakes? 

Eileen Chambers: Yes. The biggest mistake I would say that I have experienced is clients trying to market time. It seems on the surface, so simple to do. It’s really only in hindsight that you can do it. And we can’t operate that way. And my job has been through the crises that you’ve mentioned, but also over time is coaching clients that staying in the market is so much more important than timing it. If you try to time when to get in and when to get out, those are two incredibly difficult decisions. And I would say impossible to time properly. And you know, certainly the latest example in 2020 was it’s still so fresh in my mind that we saw the market go down tremendously, in a very short period of time in March of 2020. Who would have thought the market turnaround, so downward 30% at one point and most of that recovered by June and up 16% by the end of the year. It’s just an incredible example. And there was honestly not one good thing to feel about the market or the economy in June 2020 yet the market recovered so much more quickly than was anticipated. 

Hank Smith: The market has a way of doing just the opposite of what you expect and that is true in any part of the investment cycle.

Eileen Chambers: I think I would add to that as maybe the second level is not mixing politics with investing. We’re investing in companies and businesses. Politics can always be really tumultuous. And perhaps it seems worse now than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It just because it’s now and I think that really trying to keep the politics out of investing has been very important and a very good lesson I think for clients as we have those discussion. 

Hank Smith: It would seem to me the advent of news and the delivery of news, particularly opinionated news, has helped create this partisan divide that we currently experience that really is nothing like it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. 

Eileen Chambers: I think that’s regardless of what side you’re on or what side you have conviction about. You really need to separate your investing from your politics. Of course, you have to take policies, very large policies into consideration and how they trickle down. And that’s what we do very well here at Haverford. But you do not want to vote with your politics in my opinion. 

Hank Smith: The two mistakes from your perspective that investors really need to avoid is getting out market and trying to get in, get out, get in and keeping politics out of their investments. Don’t let politics sway how you’re going to invest. So that leads me to, I think, a very important question and that is asset allocation. The allocation between the percentage that clients have in equities, fixed income, and cash. It would seem to me that that’s the most important thing a portfolio manager can do to get it right in order to keep investors in the market for as long as possible.  

Eileen Chambers: Right and that’s that risk, understanding risk and what 2020 taught clients again, and me together we learned what risk tolerance really was. We had the run up to 2020 was quite nice. There were very good returns in 2019,2020 and even in 2021 so that run up, all ships were rising at that time. You don’t determine real risk tolerance then, but and what you do in 2020 we did determine real risk tolerance. And that led us to really having revived a conversation again with existing clients and potential clients is what is your risk tolerance and how can we allocate your assets so that you can stay in the market? And there’s not one single answer, and it’s not age based. I have clients who are very comfortable in their late 80s to be 100% equity, and I have clients that are very uncomfortable being with 50% equity in their 40s. These are conversations that are incredibly important and are consistently revisited. 

Hank Smith: Can you tell us how technology has impacted portfolio management, how you manage portfolios and communicate with clients? 

Eileen Chambers: The information changes since 1991 is absolutely daunting. There’s just so much information, I think from the outside world is our job number one, is to cut out some of the noise. So that’s technology in one way. I think technologically internally, the ways that we’re able to communicate with clients has vastly changed. We saw that especially in 2020, with the advent of really using Zoom on a daily basis, where some technology like that Teams or GoToMeeting that has been I think revolutionary. But also, the way we trade. When I first started in the business, we were writing manual stock purchase tickets and the way that we can get things done, the efficiency and the scalability. It’s given us, I think, a tremendous opportunity to do what we do well, to many more people but not lose that personal touch, which is really, as mentioned, the delivery is everything.  

Hank Smith: So, Eileen, what advice would you give someone pursuing a career in investment management? 

Eileen Chambers: I think it’s been a tremendous career for me, I try to encourage everyone to really think about it. And a particular bias I would say is, not necessarily at Haverford, but in the business in general, I think we need more women and I think the opportunity for women is incredible and women tend to live longer. And so, I think having that female voice as an as an advocate for female investors for the long run is really important. I would say that the age of being unprepared and to be okay is gone. Information is everywhere and if you’re not absorbing it, you are not going to be competitive. So, I do think that reading voraciously, listening to podcasts and finding your voice and being unbiased with that voice is incredibly valuable. And there’s incredible opportunities with certified financial planners with CFAs. I think that it’s just really a tremendous career and regardless of where you start, if you have the right attitude, and you have the right vision, I think you can make an incredible career in financial services. 

Hank Smith: And speaking of women, particularly women at Haverford, over 50% of our portfolio managers are women, and 50% of the leadership team at Haverford are women. And you were very helpful in the creation of the Speaker Series for Women, the education and empowering programs just for women, delivered by the women of Haverford. Can you tell us a little bit about the Speaker Series for Women? 

Eileen Chambers: Yes, it has been such a great success. I think it was a small idea in the beginning. Let’s start this. And of course Binney Wietlisbach, our prior president, started really launched the program, but it has grown. I love the mix of what we do. Women empowerment, education and networking. And that’s something that we create a safe place for all of those opportunities for women, and the events grew from being small, 20-25 women to now there are hundreds in attendance and we’re just so proud of that and the mixture, I think of what we present is just in a very, it’s not intimidating, but we recognize that there’s all levels of education that we can offer. And we want to do it in a safe place, friendly. And we all learn from something. I think Binney said it best, If was this a good use of your time at the end of every event and if you learned one thing that you didn’t know when you walked in the door, this was a success. So, it’s not necessarily life changing in every way. But what it is I completely agree with that if you learn one thing, and I can’t imagine somebody in those rooms, and didn’t learn something, and that’s our goal, and it’s been consistent over the last 11 years. It’s been a success over the last 11 years, and I can see it going on and on and we’re really proud of that. 

Hank Smith: Well, I can see that you have a lot of passion for the speaker series for women. Can you share with us, outside of Haverford, what are you passionate about, what activities keep you occupied? 

Eileen Chambers: I have a wonderful husband and two daughters, but I’m also the youngest of eight children. So, we have quite a large family. I would say our most recent passion as a family is supporting my oldest daughter who is 24. She and her husband are fostering children. And they started doing that in 2021. And it has been an incredible life-changing experience for all of us. It’s not our first entree into fostering. My oldest sister, Mary Kay, has fostered over 70 infants from birth until they were adopted in her lifetime which is just phenomenal. And my daughter is kind of taking the reins there. And so, we’ve had some beautiful, beautiful children in our lives, that we’ve been able to care for and love and currently she and her husband are fostering two twin boys that just turned one and we’re on the path to adoption for them. So, I think awareness is a passion for us to let people know that there are children out there that are just wonderful kids that don’t have an opportunity and if you’re able to, to open your heart and open your home or support someone who does is incredibly needed and necessary to make the world a better place. 

Hank Smith: How wonderful. You have two families at home and here at Haverford that you’re passionate about. To end with this question, are there any books that you would recommend to our listening audience that you either read recently or you read a while ago that was very very impactful to you? 

Eileen Chambers: So, what I would say is one of the books, particularly on investments, I think “Learn to Earn” by Peter Lynch was a really incredible book for me years ago. “The Millionaire Next Door” was also something that I think there’s this perception particularly today that wealth has to be shown, but wealth really just needs to be grown. And I think that that is important message. I think the book was published in 2011. But I think it still is extremely important today to know that you can grow your own wealth by just making really good choices in life. I would also add to that podcasts or shows that I would listen to. Bloomberg surveillance has been one of my best friends for years and years and Tom Kean delivers a fairly unbiased view of things and I also really love to listen to Ian Bremmer from the Eurasia group. He has GZero World and I think that what he’s able to do as a political scientist is give us a really good understanding of the world in which we live in and what’s going on in the world. And give us the broader view of how we as the United States play in that world. 

Hank Smith: Thank you very much for that. And we thank you so much for sharing your insights. Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for today’s episode of Speaking of Quality, Wealth Management Insights. Thank you, Eileen, for joining us. 

Maxine Cuffe: Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking Of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of Speaking of Quality. Please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Haverford Trust Company, please visit www.HaverfordQuality.com This podcast is provided as general commentary and market overview and should not be relied upon as the best advice that is not a recommendation offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt an investment strategy. Any opinions expressed are as of the date this podcast was recorded and are the opinions of that commentator not Haverford’s. Any opinions or information provided are believed to be reliable at the time of this recording but are not necessarily all printed for accuracy. Before making any financial decisions, please consult with an investment professional.