MiB: Marta Norton, Morningstar Investment Management

This week, we speak with Marta Norton, Chief Investment Officer for Morningstar Investment Management (MIM ). The firm manages or advises on about $250 billion in advisor assets. Norton’s responsibilities include equity, alternative and fixed income research, asset allocation, and portfolio management. Before joining Morningstar in 2005, Norton was an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a research analyst at LECG LLC.

We discuss how her career evolved from an economist covering PPI at BLS to an analyst at Morningstar to a portfolio manager to CIO. Her role is to help create multi-asset model portfolios with assets that include Mutual Funds, ETFs, and Alternatives.

Today, Norton observes that markets today are experiencing a substantial change, influenced by “the three sisters”:

TINA: There is No Alternative (to stocks).
TARA: There Are Reasonable Alternative
CINDY: Credit Is Now Delivering Yield

The ideas they reflect are a change from the past decade of all equity all the tme.

A list of her favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including the podcast extras on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with The Jeremies! Professor Jeremy Siegel of Wharton, and Jeremy Schwartz, Chief Investment Officer at the $75 billion Wisdom Tree Asset Management. Siegel is the author of SFTLR (Schwartz is his research partner/editor). The two discuss the sixth edition of SFTLR, the latest and most widely expanded edition of the investment classic.