Meet David Schassler, Head of Multi-Asset Solutions

Hi, my name is Dave Schassler. I'm the head of the Multi -Asset Solutions Group here at VanEck. MAS is the acronym.

So my first job was in due diligence. Due diligence is effectively people hiring you to go out and pick the portfolio manager that's best at their job. The reason why that really shaped what I do is this. I got to be able to go out every day and speak with the people that are best at their job. So effectively looking at it and saying, well, what makes them the best? And then we did it over and over and over again across asset classes.

Key Lessons

And there was a few key lessons learned that really shaped the way that we think about investing.

And the first one is this, everybody paints the canvas differently, meaning that there's great quantitative portfolio managers, there's great fundamental portfolio managers. Because of that, we bring both of those disciplines together in what we do.

The second lesson learned, mistakes happen. Recognize that, understand that, learn from that, but also position yourself expecting that, meaning risk management is everything. We take risk management extraordinarily seriously in our group and we have very refined risk management processes.

So now how do we bring all that into VanEck? We do it two ways. The first, I'm on the investment committee here at the firm, so I deal with the other portfolio managers. So we're constantly working with them to review, refine their process, to help bring all those tools that we learn from due diligence in-house to make ourselves as good as we possibly can.

The second thing that we do is we apply that to our own strategies as well. Meaning our approach to asset allocation, security selection, our investment philosophy and process has been refined over time by looking at what the best portfolio managers in the business do.

Look at extended periods of time to better understand asset classes today and tomorrow

I view myself and the team as market historians. What we're really trying to do is fight short-termism. Oftentimes people are too focused on what's happening now and the recent past. We want to look at extended periods of time because we want to draw similarities of what the economy is doing today and how that impacts asset classes and how it impacted asset classes 30, 40, 50 years ago. And because of that, we can really shape our view and to better understand these asset classes and better understand what we should expect going forward.

Repeatable Small Wins Lead to Success in the Long-Term

The most important insight I can give you as an investor, and this is what shapes my personal philosophy investing. This is a business about small wins. You want to come in every day and use statistics to your advantage. So you want to take small wins over and over and over again, which then effectively, if you do it well, will compound in that and outperformance over an extended period of time, as opposed to really big wins. Because the problem with really big wins is that they're great when they work, they're terrible when they don't.

And eventually you're not going to get it right. So you want to make small bets over and over and over again, which then compound to big successes over the long run.