Breaking Down Investing Barriers and Championing Women, with Maxime Carmignac
🌟 Maxime Carmignac is the Managing Director of Carmignac UK - an asset management firm with €41.7bn of assets under management.
💸 Today, we talk about asset management, the ways in which women investors need to empower each other, tackling gender inequalities, and more.
1️⃣ Women are holding an increasing amount of money, yet they're still poorly addressed by the financial community, which is something Maxime is keen to change.
2️⃣ Carmignac is a company owned by both the Carmignac family and their employees, and Maxime explains what asset management is and what it’s like to run a family business.
3️⃣ While women are less assertive than men, they also tend to focus on longer-term investment gains rather than short-term wins, and are more concerned with sustainable investing, so Maxime offers her investment guidance to women as well as the importance of ESG.
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“Money means freedom. It should be a means to accomplish what you want to achieve in life.”
1. Helping women get wealthier
The role of Carmignac is to enable their clients to improve their savings needs over the long-term. Carmignac clients are not ultra-high net worth individuals, and Carmignac’s objective is that over the long run, if they trust them, they will do their best to answer their long-term savings needs.
Maxime believes that women, as investors, have to empower more women in their financial life. There was a big study in the US showing that one woman fighting her entire life to reduce inequality in her professional world, meant that this woman ended up making three times less money than a woman who didn’t, battle every day to reduce the gender gap, but instead just focused on improving her savings.
That’s why the asset management industry needs to focus on addressing the financial empowerment and wealth gap, and provide women with specific products that will enable them to jump into this world with confidence.
At the moment, women are poorly addressed by the financial community, and this is something close to Maxime’s heart: she tries to do her part, but believes we all need to participate to make significant changes.
2. The family business journey
Before joining Carmignac, Maxime wanted to prove herself — she wanted to go to competitive jobs where she could learn. Maxime went on to do two years in investment banking and two years in consulting before joining Carmignac.
Maxime explored different roles within the company. She is exploring new products, ESG, building investment solutions for the best strategic partners and also running the UK office.
Today, more than two thirds of Carmignac employees are either shareholders or owners of stock options. This creates a very collaborative environment, and their employees know that there are 300 of them — it feels like an extension of the family.
On the contrary, if you're a public company, you can feel huge short term pressure. You need to beat this target for the next quarterly earnings, otherwise analysts will downgrade your stock and your share price will go down. This doesn't always equal the best long term investments.
At Carmignac, Maxime feels that it’s lucky that they are independent, enables them to have a longer time horizon and their key priority: the long term investment needs for clients. Having a long-term focus means that they can make certain investments, even if the payback will not necessarily be there in a year or two.
3. Addressing women’s needs
When it comes to investment, studies show that men and women want different things. Women are more interested in the why: why should I invest? Will it enable me to buy a country home for my kids, to pay the school fees of my grandkids? They are very busy taking care of their kids, of their parents when they get older, and they are less interested in the short term excitement of investment.
For the men, on the other hand, they like the how: how I am going to invest, am I going to invest in emerging markets or US equity? They like this short term adrenaline, the like gambling effect.
Therefore, you need different financial products for women. Women tend to be less assertive and more focused on the long-term, so they look more at the sustainability outcome of a product. This is what Maxime had in mind with Carmignac Portfolio Grandchildren - a fund Maxime designed with women in mind, to empower them to invest and to get some confidence. It is a fund with a very high sustainable ambition, and it seeks to achieve long-term capital growth over a minimum period of 5 years.
When you begin to invest, a lot depends on your time horizon and how old you are. If you have a very long term time horizon, volatility won’t affect you as much. If there is like a big crisis like the financial crisis, COVID, war in Ukraine — of course, you're going to have volatility in the equity market, but it will come back if you are in it for the long-term.
If you are already older, and you don't want to lose money in the short term, then you need to have a more defensive portfolio with potentially multi-asset or fixed income.
When it comes to ESG investing, Maxime feels that it’s important to be extremely modest because these are very early days. There is new regulation coming in, and while it’s an exciting time, it’s important to not get in over your head.
The tricky part about ESG is that it is very personal. Some people will tell you they only want to invest in a company which is 100% clean, and others will say they want to invest in a company which is going in the right direction to have the highest impact.
When it comes to risk, Maxime feels that the upsides of risk needs to be taken into account, as well as your time horizon.
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