Elena Ruiz Takata

Elena Ruiz Takata is a career fund selector and multi-manager investor at CaixaBank Asset Management, the fund-management arm of Spain's CaixaBank. She has spent the bulk of her career at the firm — joining around 2000, when it operated under the name InverCaixa Gestión — and by 2017 had accumulated some 24 years of experience in the financial sector. She holds a degree in Business Administration and Management (Administración y Dirección de Empresas) from the European Business School.

Before moving into fund management, Ruiz Takata worked for roughly six years as a derivatives trader specializing in interest-rate products in the treasury/trading room of BBVA. At CaixaBank AM she first spent nearly a decade running the alternative-investments team within the Open Architecture division, where she and colleague Fernando Sánchez monitored a universe of around 400 funds. In April 2017 she was named Directora de Fondos Selección (Director of Fund Selection), succeeding Helena Marino, who moved to the fixed-income team led by Guillermo Viñuales.

In May 2023 she was promoted to lead CaixaBank AM's entire Open Architecture division, becoming Director of Open Architecture & ETF Selection. In that role she oversees both the selection of third-party funds and ETFs used across the group (the retail bank, the asset manager, the Luxembourg entity and Portugal's BPI) and the management of funds-of-funds vehicles. Her promotion coincided with the hiring of Antonia Conde and Laura Lacalle to strengthen the team.

• Invests through fund and ETF selection, not direct company investing — allocating client capital to external managers and building funds-of-funds, rather than writing checks into startups.
• CaixaBank AM's selection process rests on four pillars: (1) analysis of the fund manager — its solvency, resources and organization; (2) quantitative fund analysis; (3) qualitative fund analysis; and (4) an independent review by the risk department.
• Places heavy weight on on-the-ground due diligence: beyond desk research, she says the team spends most of its time meeting managers, visiting their offices and understanding how the management firms actually function internally, in order to verify the conclusions drawn from analysis.
• On what makes a good fund manager, she cites motivation, humility and common sense — alongside technical expertise — as the most important qualities.
• Coverage spans traditional long-only funds, ETFs and alternatives, reflecting her earlier decade running the alternative-investments book.