A Midwestern fund firm's parent and an East Coast fund firm and ETF strategist are betting on a PowerShares' veteran's independent, woman-owned, direct indexing startup near San Francisco.

Lorraine Wang GAMMA Investing, LLC CEO, Founder

Yesterday, Steve Booth (chairman, president, and CEO of Baird) and Pete Quinn (CEO of RiverFront Investment Holdings Group, LLC, in which Baird holds a minority stake), confirmed that the two firms are buying a minority stake in Foster City, California-based GAMMA Investing, LLC. And Baird (based in Milwaukee) and RiverFront (based in Richmond, Virginia) gained GAMMA board seats, too; on January 3, Karrie Southall (RiverFront's chief operating officer), Laura Thurow (executive director of wealth solutions and operations at Baird), and Yu-Ming Wang (a senior advisor to GAMMA and former president of Matthews Asia) all joined GAMMA's new board of directors.

GAMMA CEO Lorraine Wang founded the custom index SMA shop in 2020 after 14 years with PowerShares and Invesco (which bought PowerShares), where she served as global head of ETF products and research. She describes GAMMA's mission as empowering financial advisors (FAs) "to provide their clients with highly personalized index solutions en masse and an opportunity to potentially increase their after-tax wealth."

"We are proud to have RiverFront Holdings and Baird as our strategic partners who can help us accelerate growth while staying independent, enabling us to bring innovation that focuses on clients' differentiated portfolio needs while keeping the costs of implementation low," Wang states.

"Direct indexing is an important piece of the investment management ecosystem for the long-term," Quinn states. "Partnering with an industry veteran like Lorraine allows us to participate in the projected growth of direct indexing while allowing our investment team to stay focused on managing our existing solutions."

Booth lauds Wang's "well-established reputation."

"Her team's client-focused approach is aligned with ours, and this investment enables us to further expand the high-quality solutions we make available to our financial advisors and their clients."

Baird and RiverFront's investment in GAMMA comes to light as an RIA custodian and B-D ally, an index fund titan, and an active fund giant are all buying direct or custom indexing specialists. 

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