Rusty Guinn
Co-Founder and CEO
Rusty Guinn is co-Founder and CEO of Second Foundation Partners, LLC, and has been a contributing author to Epsilon Theory since 2017.
Before Ben and Rusty established Second Foundation, Rusty served in a variety of investment roles in several organizations. He managed and operated a $10+ billion investment business, led investment strategy for the second largest wealth management franchise in Houston, and sat on the management committee of the 6th largest public pension fund in the United States.
Most recently, Rusty was Executive Vice President over the retail and institutional asset management businesses at Salient Partners in Houston, Texas. There he oversaw the 5-year restructuring and transition of Salient’s $10 billion money management business from legacy fund-of-funds products to a dedicated real assets franchise.
He previously served as Director of Strategic Partnerships and Opportunistic Investments at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $12 billion portfolio spanning public and private investments. Rusty also served as a portfolio manager for TRS’s externally managed global macro hedge fund and long-only equity portfolios. He led diligence, process development and the allocation of billions of dollars across a wide range of indirect and principal investments.
Rusty’s career also includes roles with de Guardiola Advisors, an investment bank serving the asset management industry, and Asset Management Finance, a specialized private equity investor in asset management companies.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School, and lives on a farm in Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Pam and sons Winston and Harry. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Houston Youth Symphony, and with Pam has been a long-time supporter and founding Friend of the Houston Shakespeare Festival. He also serves as a member of the Easton Volunteer Fire Company in Easton, Connecticut. Rusty spends his free time smoking meat, working his apple orchard, enjoying whisky, badly butchering progressive rock drumming and jeopardizing long-term relationships through high-stakes board games.
Articles by Rusty:
A moment to say thanks and accept responsibility.
This Office Hours is all about Coronavirus, except it’s not – it’s all about how institutions who solve for Narrative outcomes invariably create bad results in the Real World.
Our social institutions require of us many songs. One of those songs is about the roots of poverty in immorality. If we’re going to stop singing their songs, this may be a good place to start.
Because the danger of powerful memes, cartoons and narratives is not that they demand our acquiesence. It is that they demand our participation.
Like other topics, Recession narratives rose somewhat in attention and cohesion, but less dramatically than other categories.We believe that this is because coronavirus outbreak fears…
The decline in the strength of the Q4 Narrative of a risk of “collapse” in credit markets continued in January. Uniquely among our macronarratives, cohesion…
Like other topics, Recession narratives rose somewhat in attention and cohesion, but less dramatically than other categories. We believe that this is because coronavirus outbreak…
Attention on Trade and Tariffs topics rose somewhat, but the inclusion of coronavirus language proved a distraction to the stories being told about them rather…
Attention on and cohesion of Central Bank macro narratives rose sharply in January. We believe that this is largely the result of a (hopefully!) short-term…
Attention on inflation rose rapidly and surprisingly in January, we think in response to two developments: The very modest emergence of inflation in even heavily…