Episode 4—Championing the investor: Is Lou Harvey the last person standing?

Imagine it’s the weekend and you finally have some free time to catch up on reading. Even if you’re an active investor, it’s unlikely you’ll be curling up with a mutual fund prospectus or a performance report.

Financial institutions are not known for providing clear, concise and easy-to-digest information about investment performance—a problem our guest today has built his career on solving. Lou Harvey, founder of DALBAR, has been hailed for his contributions to elevating the level of excellence in the financial and regulatory industry. His interest has always been focused on understanding and protecting the highly individualized best interests of all investors.

In this episode of Change Makers and Their Stories, Lou discusses what motivates him to continue wrestling with seemingly unsolvable problems. We’ll also hear from him about the one thing he would change if he could change anything in the financial industry.

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About Lou Harvey

Born on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast and then raised in his mother’s native Jamaica from the age of nine through college, educated at the University of the West Indies. In the early 1960s Lou Harvey arrived in New York with a degree in physics and no thought of ever working in the financial world. A direct mail letter from a broker changed that—and the course of his life.

“I met with the guy and he told me about these things called ‘mutual funds,’ about diversification and risk management and the opportunities in the capital markets,” Harvey recalls. “I said, ‘This is for me.’” He was registered as an NASD representative soon thereafter.

But opportunities in the nascent mutual funds arena were scarce at the time and Harvey spent the next five years in publishing. But by 1970 he was back in it, starting up new businesses. In 1976, he founded the financial services market research firm DALBAR Inc. in Boston, where he remains its president.

About Change Makers and Their Stories Podcast

Change Makers and Their Stories brings to life the stories behind the industry disruptors, marketing innovators and leaders driving change in today’s world. It’s produced and hosted by Carpenter Group, a New York City-based creative agency that helps major global financial institutions, professional services firms and technology companies build a strategic advantage for their brands in a competitive and constantly evolving world.