Discover how curiosity drives better outcomes for you

I've been involved in equity investing for 33 years.

What I found over time that equities have outperformed over nearly all time periods is not because the average stock is a good investment. It is because of the outliers, those stocks that can grow consistently over many years and can compound returns for investors.

The question is how do you develop a process that increases the chances of identifying these opportunities in a repeatable way. 

We believe that it's by having sufficient resources, creating the right networks, and turning over as many stones as you can that we're able to be relentless in the pursuit of these ideas and rigorous in asking the right questions.

One investment that stands out for me is a little known UK PC company.

I was curious that there was a unique chip design business hidden away in that company that our technology analysts had tipped me off to.

For a small cap, we felt we'd identified a big opportunity.

That technology grew into a major player in smartphones and supercomputers, as well as a long-term investment for T. Rowe Price.

What makes a good company a great investment is a vision and a strategy that invests for scaleat the very start.

And it's by having a reliable process that pushes us to ask the right questions that enables us to identify those opportunities.

Early in my career, before I came to T. Rowe, I was a sovereign analyst at a major credit rating agency through the global financial crisis.

While I was there, I made a lot of good contacts at the European Commission because they were the ones that were heavily involved in negotiating and building the rescue packages for countries in Eastern Europe.

Little did I know at the time how useful those contacts would become later on.

Fast-forward to 2010, when I came to T. Rowe Price and the eurozone crisis was kicking off with panic around Ireland, one of the first things that I did was to hop on the Eurostar, go to Brussels, walk the halls of the Department for Economic and Financial Affairs in order to get their perspective on what was really going on.

And what I found curious was the contrast between their quiet confidence that Ireland was going to be able to manage through this crisis and the panic that was taking place in the markets as people sold Irish bonds at incredible yields.

So I came back to London, and after working through the numbers, we determined that it would be good for our clients to invest in Irish government bonds.

A similar process led to us investing in many other countries over the next five years, including Slovenia, Cyprus, and Greece.

So what started off as questions about quiet confidence in the halls in Brussels and the panic in the market ultimately led to long-term investment.

For me, curiosity is about finding the right people, asking the right questions, in order todeliver long-term value for our clients.

Our first visit to Serbia was in 2013 when we were exploring opportunities to invest in a new developing market.

While walking through the airport, I noticed two large jets sitting on the tarmac, one coming from the United Arab Emirates, and another from Turkey. It raised my curiosity. Why would we have two large jets sitting at the tarmac in a relatively small country, very small airport at this time in history?

I decided to explore and, in the following meetings with government and central bank officials, raised a number of questions about potential foreign direct investments.

The answers were very intriguing. Actually, the first large foreign investment came from the United Arab Emirates into the field of agriculture, particularly to maintain food security for the countryand develop agricultural land for the production of camel feed and fodder for the United Arab Emirates.

This was, however, only the beginning. Later on, we discovered that investments were going to the industrial sector in tourism and were completed with the multi-billion dollar investment in the so-called Belgrade waterfront, a small replica of Dubai sitting on the Danube River in Belgrade.

The early start of the investmentprovided us with an opportunity to maintain a long term over five yearholding into the local bond market and we became the largest nonresident investor in the country, providing benefit firstly to our investors, to the company, but also to the country itself.

What started with noticing two jets at the tarmac materialised into a long term investment in Serbia local bond market. Curiosity, to me, means asking the right questions in order to get the right answers.

Curiosity enables T. Rowe Price to deliver long-term value to our clients.