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:
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist, in which we consider a going-forward rule for infrastructure editorials, a different kind of Valley Girl, an emerging Get Out of Dodge Narrative, and SEO as a service.
It’s the Friday Zeitgeist, in which people who will never buy a company learn how to do it, Powell delivers a belly-rub and takes away a child’s cookie jar simultaneously, Swiss francs climb the Zeitgeist ladder, a local bank makes it up on volume, and we all declare together that an OK faux-hamburger is more than just a faux-hamburger.
It’s the Tuesday Zeitgeist, in which we explore how you could go with this (or you could go with that), the power of AS, my respect for you, IPOs aplenty and the trade/rotation of choice.
The student loan crisis is a Big Deal. And it is only a part of a Bigger Deal: the Myth of College.
This issue will be front-and-center in the upcoming elections. We will all be handed our very own ‘Yay, College’ signs to raise high. More often than not, we will be asked to raise them in service of market-distorting policies which will make our problems worse.
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist, which means we leave the world of finance behind us to delve into bipartisan distrust of government, local opinion writers’ opinions on packaging materials, Yoopers, F-35 sales to completely trustworthy foreign partners, Fiat Features and the worst thing I ever saw.
In which Ben and Rusty discuss financialization, the incentivizes of low interest rate policy, the ‘financialization’ of education and the meaning of both for us…
The Monday Zeitgeist today is about companies actually being allowed to go bankrupt, the usual DB/CBK chatter, money flow cartoons, great moments in bad metagame, and a decent little personal finance column.
This Weekend Edition is a bit of a downer, but the Zeitgeist is what it is. And the non-financial markets Zeitgeist right now? It’s all about poverty, the spirit of poverty and how people transform our concerns about both into political power.
It’s the Wednesday Zeitgeist, chock full of belied recessions, a little bit of humility, a little bit of YOLO, an expensive investment sold on yield, a less expensive investment sold on yield, slow maybes and a peek into the Widening Gyre.
Disney is making a play to return to Neverland, a land where valuations are based on establishing market share and dominance of an emerging industry, where the moment you start worrying about how much money you’re making is the moment the narrative breaks. For students of markets and narratives alike, it will be worth watching.