Spotlight on Aziz Hamzaogullari, Chief Investment Officer, Loomis, Sayles & Company
Global Thought Leader Spotlight
Aziz Hamzaogullari, Chief Investment Officer, Loomis, Sayles & Company
In my role as Chief Investment Officer and portfolio manager of the Growth Equity Strategies team at Loomis, Sayles & Company, I direct the research process for this strategy, and lead the team’s investment philosophy and process, which I founded.
The Growth Equity Strategies investment team has seven dedicated research analysts and one research associate who examine the companies in assigned business segments, market sectors, and industries from a long-term, growth-centric perspective. The team has a group process from idea generation through their seven-step fundamental research analysis. I am responsible for portfolio construction and make all final buy and sell decisions in the portfolio.
Price volatility in equity investing
A recent article in the Journal of Portfolio management identified 23 “downside tail events” over the prior 150 years, defined as a market decline of 15% or greater. That’s an average of 1 tail event every 6.5 years. Four of the events occurred in the last two decades, so the frequency of such events has been even greater of late. In fact, since its 1979 inception, the Russell 1000 Growth index has experienced an intra-year drawdown in excess of 10% on average every 2.5 years. The frequency of these market declines suggests to us that risk is always “on”. We believe event risk is always around the corner.
Looking back on historical drawdowns, in our experience, no one talks about the precursors the day before. Only after the fact with hindsight bias do investors typically rationalise these price movements.
We believe price volatility is an inherent part of equity investing. And, because we believe attempts to time the market or to predict each drawdown and exogenous event, are futile, we therefore believe navigating the inevitable ups and downs requires a permanent and structural approach to risk management.
Implications for sophisticated investors
As most passive strategies allocate capital broadly and without regard to valuation, we believe passive investing exposes investors to greater risk of loss, and consequently, less efficient compounding of long-term returns.
We believe investors take false comfort in thinking that a portfolio with 400 or 500 securities and representation from all “sectors” ensures prudent diversification of risk. Not only does owning hundreds of stocks not contribute meaningfully to portfolio diversification, but we believe it significantly increases the risk of owning companies that you cannot possibly know as well, and whose valuations may be unattractive or worse.
In contrast to the prevailing passive and benchmark-centric active approaches that rely on a large number of holdings with broad representation across industry sectors, we believe risk is more efficiently managed by ensuring prudent diversification of the underlying business drivers to which one’s portfolio holdings are exposed, where the positive impact of one may offset the negative impact of another.
By investing in companies whose cash flow growth is derived from a diversified and lowly correlated set of business drivers, we believe risk can be mitigated more effectively than using traditional sector definitions which can potentially mask high underlying correlation between stocks in different sectors.
Aziz will be presenting at Global Investment Institute’s upcoming Equities Investment Forum, taking place on Wednesday, 10 September 2025 in Melbourne CBD, Victoria. To register your interest in attending, click here or for more information email zlatan@globalii.com.au.
Aziz Hamzaogullari, Chief Investment Officer, Loomis, Sayles & Company
Aziz is the Chief Investment Officer and founder of the Growth Equity Strategies team at Loomis, Sayles & Company. He is the portfolio manager of the Loomis Sayles Large Cap Growth, All Cap Growth, Global Growth, and International Growth long-only strategies as well as the Long/Short Growth Equity Strategy.
Aziz is also an Executive Vice President and a member of the firm’s Board of Directors. He joined Loomis Sayles in 2010 from Evergreen Investments, where he was a senior portfolio manager and managing director. Aziz joined Evergreen in 2001 and was promoted to director of research in 2003 and portfolio manager in 2006. He was head of Evergreen’s Berkeley Street Growth Equity team and founded the team’s research and investment process. Prior to Evergreen, he served as a senior equity analyst and portfolio manager at Manning & Napier Advisors.
Aziz has over 25 years of investment industry experience. He holds a BS from Bilkent University, Turkey, and an MBA from George Washington University. He is also a CFA® charterholder.
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