EMILY DAVIES
AGE: 28 Partner Linde Equity
LIFE STORY: Attending fine arts school as a child didn't foreshadow Emily Davies' career in finance, but the Fort Langley native comes from an entrepreneurial family. Her grandfather, a Swedish immigrant, bought real estate throughout the Lower Mainland–as well as businesses her parents worked in. “In the household, chatter was always around business and responsibility and opportunity,” Davies remembers.
So she attended SFU Beedie School of Business, where she took part in Beedie Endowment Asset Management (BEAM), a program that lets students run their own investment portfolio. After earning a business administration and finance degree in 2015, Davies joined RBC Capital Markets' Vancouver office as an analyst. Just before that, Teal Linde, founder of local independent investment firm Linde Equity, had asked her to write a business plan for his new fund. The Linde Equity Fund exceeded Davies' “optimistic” forecast after its 2016 debut, and Linde invited her to buy into the firm two years later, making her full partner in 2019.
Davies, who notes that her industry is still more than 80-percent male, co-founded the Linde Davies Investment Challenge. The annual competition sees teams of three–at least one member of each must be female–pitch a stock for a $10,000 prize pool. BOTTOM LINE: The Linde Equity
Fund posted a 25.1percent return in 2020 and a 13.4-percent compound annualized return over the past four years. Davies, who now leads the fund, has tripled its assets under management in three years, to $96 million.
Unlike many such vehicles run by national firms, the Linde Equity Fund has the latitude to buy mid- and small-cap stocks, she explains. And unlike most mutual funds, it isn't confined to a particular asset class or geography. “We can cherry-pick all of our favourite ideas from those different categories,” Davies says. “We're well positioned to outperform as a result.”
Private capital is on her firm's radar, too. Davies recently joined the board of Cortico Health Technologies, a Vancouverbased provider of patient engagement software in which $366-million Linde Equity is an investor. “I think there's fertile ground for early-stage capital,” she says of the city's booming tech sector.