Rick Seto

Rick J. Seto, CFA is a Managing Director and Vice President at Flaherty & Crumrine Incorporated, an investment adviser that specializes in preferred, contingent-capital, and related income securities. The firm says it has managed preferred securities portfolios for institutional clients and investment funds since its founding in 1983, and describes itself as an independent, employee-controlled adviser.

Seto joined Flaherty & Crumrine in October 2003. He is a member of the firm’s credit committee, where his coverage focuses on global banks, REITs, and industrials. Before joining the firm, he spent eight years as an equity and fixed-income analyst and eight years as a commercial bank lending officer.

From 1999 to 2003, Seto was an Associate Equity Analyst at UBS Investment Bank covering natural gas pipelines, local distribution companies, electric utilities, and master limited partnerships. Before UBS, he worked from 1996 to 1999 at Moody’s Investors Service as an Associate Analyst covering investment-grade consumer products and retail companies. From 1991 to 1996, he worked at Fleet Bank/NatWest Bank as an AVP and commercial lending officer, and earlier began his career at Heller Financial as a financial analyst in asset-based lending.

Seto completed a formal credit-training program at NatWest Bank and earned a B.S. in Statistics and Econometrics from New York University. Flaherty & Crumrine also notes that he was a member of UBS’s top-ranked Institutional Investor All-America Natural Gas Equity Research Team in 2003.

• Flaherty & Crumrine’s investment focus is preferred, contingent-capital, and related income securities rather than private-company venture rounds.
• The firm states that it seeks to achieve results in preferred and contingent-capital securities by managing “credit risk and reinvestment risk.”
• Its process combines intensive credit research, quantitative analysis, and pragmatic trading strategies.
• The firm explicitly says it does not rely on “heroic bets on individual credits” or attempts to predict interest-rate direction.
• Seto’s credit committee work focuses on global banks, REITs, and industrials.