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| > Features > Undiscovered Managers |
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| Ray Kennedy and Mark Hudoff, Hotchkis & Wiley High Yield |
| by
Eric Jacobson
| 06-22-10 |
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Ray Kennedy and Mark Hudoff are a couple of happy guys. It's certainly not because they're sitting atop an empire. They're running a little more than $100 million at a small firm that boasts a modest $15.7 billion under management and has the distinction of having undergone two changes of ownership in the past 10 years.
Their lives appear to be more fulfilling than they had been for a while, though. Things went well enough when they started at PIMCO. They were hired and mentored by Ben Trosky to hunt for high-yield bond issuers with hard assets, cash flows, and compelling credit profiles. Kennedy and Hudoff worked together at PIMCO for about 10 years, five as analysts under Trosky, who built a great record and reputation running PIMCO High Yield PHYDX. Kennedy eventually joined Trosky as a comanager and succeeded him when Trosky retired at the end of 2002. Kennedy then turned the reins over to Hudoff in 2007. Hudoff left PIMCO last year.
Neither Kennedy nor Hudoff have anything bad to say about PIMCO, and they remain big fans of their colleagues who remain at the firm. And the pair sound almost wistful when describing their analyst days under Trosky. Yet it's clear that a toll was taken on Kennedy by the time he left in 2007 and that the place no longer suited Hudoff when he departed in 2009. Each reigned atop an enormous pool of high-yield bond assets during his managerial tenure, and the challenges were huge. The fund's relatively conservative strategy meant that they favored better-capitalized issuers and large liquid bonds. But even so, the fund's size meant that there were times when it was difficult to get as much exposure to a particular credit or sector as either would have liked. And straying from that sweet spot in search of other opportunities wasn't worthwhile with such a large asset base. Their records at PIMCO High Yield argue that they were successful managers, but Kennedy and Hudoff both say that it became more difficult to add value with their efforts, particularly as PIMCO began to put the same macro themes across all of its portfolios regardless of mandate. An evolution of the firm's culture also brought more intensity to the job than either of them wanted, and by the time Hudoff left, PIMCO had become the full-blown pressure cooker that it is today.
A Fresh Start
After some time off, Kennedy started at Hotchkis and Wiley in late 2008. Hudoff followed in mid-2009, just a few months after Kennedy launched Hotchkis & Wiley High Yield HWHAX. Hotchkis is 50 miles away from PIMCO in Los Angeles, but it might as well be in another solar system. Kennedy and Hudoff are two of 62 employees, more than half of whom together own a majority of the firm's equity. And although Kennedy and Hudoff are running only a tiny slice of the firm's assets, their presence is a big deal, not unlike a sports team that signs two established all-stars.
Kennedy and Hudoff talk about going to Hotchkis and Wiley as a dramatic, welcome return to their credit-analyst roots. Kennedy, in particular, talks about burying his head in company research as if it's a calling from which he inadvertently strayed. Starting fresh, with a small asset base, will afford some strategic freedom, as well. Hudoff notes that he and Kennedy prefer the undervalued bonds of hard asset borrowers over the leveraged-buyout debt that dominates much of the high-yield market, and the two believe that working with Hotchkis' large equity staff will help those efforts. As a result, they expect the fund to have broader credit exposure, inclusive of smaller firms with public equity, than PIMCO High Yield has offered. That's going to mean a much wider variety of names, given that they peg roughly 55% of the high-yield market as comprising bond issues with less than $500 million in outstanding issuance. And this fund likely will not be as heavily dominated by BB rated debt (the highest tier below so-called investment-grade debt) as was the pair's PIMCO charge. It will have more assets in the B (and perhaps CCC) rating strata that make up the bulk of the high-yield universe.
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