This is an extended version of the profile that appeared in the May issue of Investment Advisor, part of AdvisorOne's Special Report profiling this year's members of the IA 25, the most influential people in and around the advisor universe. See the complete list and Special Report schedule for extended profiles of all the 2011 members of the IA 25.
Not content to rest on his laurels as MFS Investment Management chairman emeritus, Bob Pozen is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before his tenure at MFS—which in 1924 established America's first open-end mutual fund, the Massachusetts Investors Trust—Pozen was vice chairman of Fidelity Investments and president of Fidelity Management & Research Co.
In short, he is a man who knows his way around the industry. That helps explain why this year Pozen (left) and co-author Theresa Hamacher published the painstakingly detailed "The Fund Industry: How Your Money Is Managed," a book providing such a thorough examination of how mutual funds are bought, sold and managed that it stands to become the fund industry's bible.
"Just as veteran stock fund managers prize their tattered copies of Ben Graham and David Dodd's 'Security Analysis,' coming generations of fund industry leaders will cling to this essential text," writes Morningstar Managing Director Don Phillips in the new book's foreword.
Pozen himself is modest when discussing his reputation as an elder statesman and conscience of the industry. Asked during a recent AdvisorOne interview if all the salient points in his impressive resume are indeed accurate, Pozen joked, "I'm afraid they are."
The mutual funds guru is serious, however, when discussing retirement issues such as target-date funds and Social Security.
