My name is Rich Howe. I’m 35 years old and live outside Boston with my wife and 4 year old daughter and 1 year old son. For my entire life, I’ve loved investing.

My dad was a large cap equity portfolio manager in Boston and my mom was a junk bond analyst for PIMCO, and so growing up, I would pester them constantly with questions about investing. Luckily, they would humor me and do their best to answer my repetitive and basic questions. In high school and then in college, I joined the investment club and continued to build my investing knowledge.

After graduating from Trinity College in Connecticut, I joined Eaton Vance full-time as an equity research associate. While at Eaton Vance, I completed the Chartered Financial Analyst program and earned the CFA designation. Eaton Vance was a great place to learn the investment business, and I had the opportunity to cover many industries (software, internet, health care, financials). It was while at Eaton Vance that I read Joel Greenblatt’s You Can Be a Stock Market Genius and became instantly hooked on investing in stock spin-offs. I had some success (EGL and FURX) and some failures (TMQ), but I kept learning important lessons.

In 2013, I left Eaton Vance to join Citi Private Bank to work in the private equity research group. What attracted me to Citi was that private equity was a much less competitive asset class than large cap equities (my primary focus at Eaton Vance). Eaton Vance and many of the large long-only asset managers were facing and continue to face headwinds due to secular growth of ETFs and index funds. It is very difficult to beat the market consistently when you are investing in a large cap highly diversified portfolio and paying a 1% management fee. According to Forbes, “the S&P 500 outperformed more than 92% of large-cap funds over the last 15 years.” In contrast, private equity has consistently outperformed public markets. While private equity has gotten more competitive as more dollars have flowed to the asset class, it remains today significantly less efficient than the large cap equity world.

My time at Citi was a great experience. I was able to learn the private equity business, interact with smart/talented colleagues, and learn how a sophisticated global investment bank operates. While at Citi, I continued to invest my personal account almost exclusively in stock spin-offs and happily, my decade of focusing on stock spin-offs, began to bear fruit. I made 257% and 104% investing in LSYN and NVTR. I made 53% investing in APVO. Of course, I made some mistakes (see QHC). But in sum, my official spin-off recommendations that I have published have done well.

In April 2018, I left Citi to focus full time on this site. My goal is to make it the best resource for investors who are interested in stock spin-offs.

Through this site, I want to share the lessons that I’ve learned.  I want to save you time as you sort through the spin-off news flow. And most of all, I want to help you make money.

Have questions or comments? Fill out the form below, and I will get back to you.