Les Funtleyder is a longtime health care investor who started his professional investing career just over two decades ago. Today, he is a health care portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management in New York. He’s also an author of the book called “Health Care Investing.” He was in Boston recently to give a guest lecture at Tufts University and he stopped by STAT’s offices for a chat about the current and future state of health care investing.
We want you to compare and contrast biotech investing today versus when you started on Wall Street. The science, of course, has gotten a lot more complex. So how do you adapt?
Compared to a long time ago — two decades is now officially a long time ago — it’s actually gotten a lot more professional. Back in the ’90s, biotech investing was the Wild West. We didn’t have the sophisticated scientist folks actually either creating companies or analyzing companies. And now over the last 20 years, it’s become a lot more sophisticated, both on the research side and also on the company development side. And on the one hand, it’s great because now we have far fewer companies that are invented around promotion. So that’s a good thing. But the characters have mostly exited the industry and it’s sort of not as interesting.
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