Thrasher Funds

Last Sunday, as I was dutifully surfing the internet for You Tube videos to entertain myself with, I stumbled across an interview with the founders of Thrasher Funds, an investment fund targeted towards the young, trendy MTV crowd. Since this is a highly sought after demographic, I was curious to see what Thrasher’s approach would be in terms of marketing itself to said masses. I hopped over to their website to find out more about what they were about. And the answer was simple and obvious: not much.

Now, lest this sound like a post dedicated solely to ranting, I will say this: I honestly believe they mean well, but their idea got lost in the translation to make it appeal to a young audience. Here’s a rundown of the site to provide context.

Thrasher Funds is a website dedicated to furthering financial knowledge and expertise to a much marketed to audience – the Gen Y/MTV crowd. Their motto is “Invest Like a Rock Star”. They feature interviews with up and coming designers and promote highly recognizable brand names. However, their main draw and focus is on the GendeX Fund, a mutual fund managed by James C. Perkins Jr. of Thrasher Capital Management.

Perkins has a strong background – working for ZBI Equities, Alliance Capital and Morgan Stanley – but I have to wonder about his choice of the fund’s investment picks. Its entire strategy is seemingly based on choosing the stocks of well-known, hip companies. Granted I haven’t seen their entire portfolio, but out of their top 30 company holdings ten (33%) are in the fashion industry (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, LuLu Lemon, Burberry). Now, I’m no financial expert, but I do invest and having that large of a portion dedicated to one industry is never a good idea. Thus the old Wall Street mantra, “Diversify your portfolio!”

Further more, I’m insulted that Thrasher believes that in order to appeal to my generation, that it needs a brightly colored, hot pink website, the option of having R&B music playing in the background, and celebrity interviews that are hardly related to investing. Is this a way to pull in a younger crowd and then slowly transition them to making more educated investment decisions? Maybe.

I can absolutely appreciate that they are trying to wrestle investing from the thresholds of the crusty upperclass and bring it to a generation that is in dire need of financial education and instruction. But, I don’t think the way to do that is to push well-known names in lieu of educating a generation about the entire spectrum of industries and companies to invest in –even the not-so-trendy ones. As it stands, Thrasher reeks of a futile attempt to impress the “cool” kids; it’s all surface with very little substance.

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