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Natalie Tam is a Portfolio Manager, Systematic Equities at Australian Ethical, managing funds worth around A$4bn. Natalie shares her career journey, from an initial curiosity about companies sparked during university days to a career in investments spanning over 20 years, and offers insights on diversity, work-life balance and why she loves investment management.
Natalie is also a mentor with our YourEDGE mentoring and advocacy program.
There are some kids who start investing at 10 years of age, but that definitely wasn’t me. I wasn’t interested in the stock market until the last years of my university degree when I took a course in management accounting. I was fascinated by the case studies on company strategy and analysing what made a company fail or succeed. I started buying myself the Harvard Business Review magazine at a newsagent so I could read more case studies. And that’s how I got interested in doing company research and eventually, it led me to my first role in equity research at Deutsche Bank.
I did 3 internships during university. My first internship was at Royal & Sun Alliance where I was lucky to have a great mentor who spent time teaching me the basics of general insurance, how revenue is made, how to control costs and how to report to the senior leadership team. It made me realise how little I knew about, well, everything! I tried to learn and add value from my very junior position, which led to my 6 month internship being extended to 18 months.
After university, I was offered a graduate position at Deutsche Bank in equity research. I had a boss who was a very skilled analyst and investor. It was a great place to develop the key building blocks of financial modelling, valuation and meeting with companies. After my stint on the sell-side, I switched to the buy-side because I wanted to invest and run portfolios. Over the next 20 years, I worked my way up from graduate analyst to portfolio manager. I’ve worked at Aberdeen Asset Management, Perpetual and now Australian Ethical.
I’ve spent two decades working in financial markets and I still find it exciting. Markets are ever-changing, and there is always something new to learn. On any given day, you can walk into the office and have your day completely blown up by a banking crisis, pandemic or some other black swan event. It’s thrilling, consuming and addictive.
I launched a Sustainable Australian Equity Fund in 2021 which won an award for high performance the following year. It was very exciting to see a fund that is focused on achieving sustainable outcomes beat the performance of mainstream/vanilla funds.
The main challenge is prioritising how I spend my time to ensure I have the biggest impact. There are a lot of day-to-day tasks that must be done to ensure the portfolios are running smoothly, but I also need to be able to zoom out and think more strategically, which requires uninterrupted time and space. At Australian Ethical, we will be exploring the theme of essentialism (inspired by Greg McKeown’s book) at our annual AEx week in March. We will be stopping the noise and pressing pause in order to explore, eliminate and execute what really matters.
I’ve spent two decades working in financial markets and I still find it exciting. Markets are ever-changing, and there is always something new to learn.
Grit is very important because markets can humble you and things won’t always go to plan. You need to be able to take a moment (or two!), shake it off, dissect what went wrong and come back stronger. I have definitely been lucky to have a network of mentors and peers in the industry who I can bounce ideas off and seek advice from.
I’ve been fortunate to mostly work in gender balanced teams, but I have met with thousands of listed companies over the years and witnessed some, quite frankly, disappointing and disheartening behaviour. In a previous role, I was a member of the 40:40 Vision investor working group, which is an investor-led initiative focused on achieving gender balance in executive leadership across ASX300 companies. Investors know that diverse teams lead to improved decision making, innovation and better financial performance, so expectations for achieving gender balance are higher than ever before.
The industry needs to do more to retain women in the mid-career stage. Many of the women who started in the industry with me 20 years ago have left, particularly after having children. At Australian Ethical, we have a 20 week paid parental leave policy. The rationale and benefits for enhancing Australian Ethical’s parental leave offering goes beyond talent attraction and retention reasons. It’s the right thing to do and Australian Ethical actively advocates companies we invest in for similar enhancements when discussing equality. Shared care, or gender-neutral parental leave, provides the same parental leave provisions and access to paid parental leave to all new parents, irrespective of their gender identity and without reference to ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ carer status. Gender-neutral parental leave is inclusive for men, women and LGBTIQ+ people, and better reflects the reality of work and care arrangements for many working families today. Shared care has benefits for women’s economic participation, and also has benefits for men and children. Also flexible parental leave policies empower parents to take paid parental leave in a manner that best suits their circumstances.
By necessity, I am extremely organised. We have schedules and calendars posted up on a whiteboard in the hallway, so everyone in the family knows what is going on. Meals are loosely planned at the beginning of the week. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to prioritise my health and exercise a lot more (because I can’t get away with the same stuff that I did in my 20s!). I am naturally analytical, and I love to get into the details at work. But when I am at home, we don’t sweat the small stuff. Sometimes you just have to accept that the house is a bit messy, or the kids have a tuckshop lunch because no one has had time to buy bread. And that’s ok.
If you want to move up the ladder, look for role models inside and outside your own organisation and think about what makes them more “senior”. For instance, if an equity analyst wants to move into portfolio management, it’s useful to take a wider lens and work on understanding the economic outlook and market strategy more broadly than a narrow sector coverage. Over time, you will stand out as someone already capable and interested in moving into portfolio construction.
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Grit is very important because markets can humble you and things won’t always go to plan. You need to be able to take a moment, shake it off, dissect what went wrong and come back stronger. I have definitely been lucky to have a network of mentors and peers in the industry who I can bounce ideas off and seek advice from.
Future IM/Pact is a collaborative initiative across the investment management industry aimed at increasing representation of female investors and creating workplace cultures where everyone can flourish.
Future IM/Pact is a collaborative initiative across the investment management industry aimed at increasing representation of female investors and creating workplace cultures where everyone can flourish.
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