Cherie Badri

Cherie Badri is the Director of Fundamental Research and a Senior Portfolio Manager at Strategic Global Advisors (SGA), an institutional asset management firm headquartered in Newport Beach, California. She joined SGA in 2006, roughly a year after the firm was founded (2005), and her responsibilities center on portfolio management, fundamental company analysis, and due diligence within SGA's global and international equity strategies. SGA describes itself as a majority women- and employee-owned firm that integrates quantitative stock-selection models with fundamental research oversight; it is led by CEO and Chairman Cynthia Tusan.

Before joining SGA, Badri spent over eight years as a Senior Associate Research Analyst at William Blair & Company in Chicago. Earlier in her career she was an Analyst at Picoco in Newport Beach, where she co-managed a fund focused on small-cap companies. Her experience is rooted in equity research and fundamental analysis of publicly traded companies rather than early-stage private investing.

Badri earned her BA in Economics from Northwestern University and holds both an MBA and an MS in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a CFA charter holder and a member of the CFA Society of Orange County.

Important correction: The provided stub data labeled Cherie Badri as an "Angel Investor" writing "Seed Round" checks. Verified public sources (her firm bio, LinkedIn, and data aggregators) show no evidence of angel or seed-stage venture activity. She is a professional portfolio manager investing in public equities on behalf of institutional clients. Founders seeking angel/seed capital are unlikely to be an appropriate fit, and the sections below reflect her actual, verifiable role.

• Invests in publicly listed global and international equities on behalf of institutional clients — not private startups.
• SGA's approach blends bottom-up quantitative stock selection with fundamental company analysis, aiming to identify undervalued companies within their industries.
• The firm emphasizes a simplified alpha model that deliberately avoids "factor creep, overfitting and dilution of signals," combining academic factor research with practitioner judgment.
• As Director of Fundamental Research, Badri's role is to apply human, company-level review to capture insights that quantitative data modeling alone cannot detect — producing more concentrated portfolios than a pure-quant manager while maintaining more consistent idea flow than a fundamental-only shop.