This week Seagraves Financial Group had a great opportunity to meet with one of our favorite fund managers, Zach Shafran, who manages the Delaware Ivy Science and Technology Fund. In his 20 years managing this portfolio, Zach has delivered consistently strong results by focusing on innovative companies that are using technology to provide the services and products that are changing our lives.
He shared a story about researching a relatively new company over 20 years ago while he was still an analyst to the fund. The company he researched had developed a phone that would allow users to access email and the internet as well as providing all the capabilities people want in a phone. Blackberry was the name of the company, and although we now take for granted that phones can and should provide all these capabilities, back then it sounded like something too good to be true!
Zach continues to look for those companies that are at the leading edge of providing us with what we need to make our lives better and easier. He told us that his fund had bought Moderna long before the Covid 19 pandemic hit, because he and his analyst saw a company that was developing the vaccines that we need to keep all of us healthy. He said that Moderna, along with other pharmaceutical companies, were able to deliver an effective vaccine for Covid 19 within months, rather than the expected 4 – 5 years because of the innovations they had already developed. This allowed our economy to reopen more quickly, and for all of us to return to life without shutdowns much more quickly.
Zach made it very clear that technology impacts every aspect of our lives – our health care, our shopping, our ability to connect with people all over the globe. His excitement about the innovations to come, and the companies that will provide them, is contagious. We are fortunate to have his insights and expertise, as well as his management of a fund we are happy to offer our clients.