YouSaid · the spoken record

Marcia Page

lines on the record: 76
first: 2023-12-11
most recent: 2023-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“With those groups. When we started Varday, many of those early relationships and other distressed debt investors were some of our very first investors. Those would be names that you'd recognize as well. Like anything, it was a combination of skills, it was a combination of operating with integrity, knowing who your partners were, and in some cases simply just avoiding credits that you knew were going to be by nature of the participants, overly difficult and litigious, which basically meant you were going to be extended from a time frame.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People wouldn't see it coming. But if you'd done your homework and you had a view on enterprise value and you knew what you were willing to pay for something and you were in a position to commit capital, that tended to go a long way in being able to operate through the system. I will tell you though there were entire credits that I avoided through my entire career. You knew that they were coming in terms of how they were going to handle relationships being overly litigious in the process and or who you would partner with rarely were you owned the entire capital structure. In those early days the distressed debt community was relatively small. You knew who operated with integrity and you sought ways to be in partnership in those parts of the capital structure.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's such a good question, certainly, particularly in the eighties and nineties. I didn't personally always appreciate how business got done. I've often said that someday I'm going to have a whole wall of all the rogue's characters that I've come across in my career. There were incredible periods of time, especially because we were in relatively illiquid markets over the counter where you had decisions where there was a ton of gray area, differences in the amount and shared quality of information and navigating that in a very sharp elbowed environment was something that you get good at, I guess. It becomes a practice skill. I haven't shared this with too many people, but my nickname was the Velvet Hammer.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They really ultimately ended up being very much a function of the rigor that we put into our talent management process and some of those very early decisions we made as a business proposition amongst the three of us.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other way than it manifested itself, it wasn't like we dictated the culture from day one, but we were very focused on the quality of how we were going to build the business from a talent point of view. So as we started building the business, certainly we had classic interviews and so forth. Very early on we brought a very rigorous pre-hire assessment that assessed critical thinking skills, drive for excellence, integrity, their personality types, but importantly how they wanted to operate in an environment where the focus was on team success and not a star culture or personal glory. I think we attracted talent that liked that rigor that put an emphasis on people and made excellence more than lip service. I think the culture of our day.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the opposite of an individual star culture. That manifested itself in a variety of ways. When we named the firm, Vardi is the Swedish word for value. We intentionally avoided using our names specifically in the business to avoid the cult of personality that can be associated with this business. The Swedish word for value also tied very much into our value investing philosophy. We really saw ourselves.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question because George and Greg and I gave that a lot of thought before we signed our two page term sheet, which by the way it'll have been thirty years this November 2nd that we signed this term sheet that lasted us for about five years. We really wanted to think about how we were going to work together. So we'd already established that we had complementary skill sets from liquid to illiquid strategies, George's an attorney by background. He brought that capability in bankruptcy and restructuring skills. But we also did our Myers Briggs. We understood our personality types, how that influenced our decision-making approaches. We brought in a similar set of values, and importantly we were really looking to continue with that ethical culture that we'd been involved in, but one that was very much collegial.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traded strategies that I was particularly strong in all the way to the illiquid part of these blown portfolios and brought those together in a single structure. We see that all over the place in the market now, but at the time that was an innovation in the market, we ultimately decided that we would be much stronger and have a stronger value proposition for the market by bringing our forces together, our complementary skill sets, bringing all of the capabilities across a much wider range of assets as an offering in the marketplace.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Originally, I was going to do this on my own. Midway through 1993, a former colleague of mine had gotten wind that I was looking at doing something. George Hicks and Greg McMillan had stayed at Cargill in the intervening five years while I had been over at Merced Partners on the more liquid traded side of the businesses. They had been very instrumental in the development of cargills purchase of those RTC assets non performing and subperforming loan portfolios. So when we got together in the middle of 1993, the idea really was that what if we actually brought our capabilities together in a new fund structure and that we brought a relative value sensibility from liquid”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was probably my entrepreneurial drive. I just became very resolved that I wanted to start a new firm and I wanted it to reflect a culture that I could be really proud of and that would ultimately reflect my values.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally had the distinct privilege of being exposed to running a full portfolio, but also to being in fundraising discussions with existing and or potential investors, who obviously were they themselves also early and identifying this as an opportunity, it was really a combination of seeing the tailwinds in first of all total returns, the love of being on the line from a PNL standpoint personally, understanding all of the fund related pieces, but also an appreciation that we were starting to see something that was moving from a nascent more cottage driven industry into something that was going to be much more substantial and that there were some tailwinds for than opportunity sent from a fundraising standpoint.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's a hedge fund doing in our room? When I told them that we had bought it in the secondary market at fifty cents on the dollar, you could literally hear a pin drop. The market didn't even have an appreciation that there was a secondary market developing in assets like bank debt. And when the default rate really started to pick up in 1990, EBF started a fund called Mercedes that I ultimately ran and that was dedicated to distress debt investing. That is really how I got into the distressed and investing business. I basically ran that portfolio from kind of cradle to grave underwriting to exits. I ran the prime broker, sized the positions, hedged the foreign exchange risk, and actually calculated the monthly returns. The intermediate step was really in conjunction with really running a distress.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When RJR was acquired by KKR, literally one of the largest LBOs at the time, they had one of the most complex capital structures that I'd ever seen. It was filled with subordinated debt and paying kind bonds. It was a huge structure and a relatively small market, and there were just pricing dislocations across that capital structure continuously. I spent the better part of my first year at EBF basically trading that capital structure, then it moved to bank debt. Back in the day, bank debt was just bespoke documentation, right? I distinctly remember trading a bank debt in a company called Revco, which is a defaulted drugstore chain, bought it at about fifty cents on the dollar, went to a bank debt meeting, I believe it was in LA. Everybody at that table was Why is this person here from Minneapolis?”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's an intermediate step there, Ted. And that is my first high yield bond that I pitched to Bob Lumpkins and three others. Those three individuals, Dick Emmerich, John Brandeborg, and Mike Fry left Cargill in nineteen eighty eight to start their own hedge fund. At the time it was called EBF and Associates, now it's called Merced Partners. Maybe it's that entrepreneurial DNA I put up my hand and said I would really like to join this firm. They really were doing a hedge fund strategy around global arbitrage, my area that I was going to focus on was really credit capital structure arbitrage. I had the benefit of being really in the early days when hedge funds were kind of a new concept and really a cottage industry and started trading on behalf of their very first fund.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was probably investing in bankrupt situations. Actually, it was exemplified by Texaco filing for bankruptcy in 1987. It was a very short-lived bankruptcy. It was really not a fundamental credit problem, but more of a litigation issue. I just remember very distinctly the rapid work that was done in and around enterprise value, but more importantly an understanding of why there was motivated selling by virtue of the downgrade of a money good credit that was motivated selling in the market, prices were dropping quite rapidly, Cargill came in and had a bid, brought liquidity, and brought a lot of dry powder. So they just had this willingness to go into dislocated markets.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was early days in the high yield market, for sure, aside from kind of the functional areas that I was involved in one of the things that was very clear during those Cargill days and learning in and around the business was the mantra that your word is your bond. So there was an enormous amount of integrity that was being brought to all of these component pieces. I distinctly remember a moment where there was a counterparty cut off from trading by virtue of not operating with that level of integrity in what was very much a developing market. So it was just this continued willingness to innovate and look at gaps in the market and be quite opportunistic. In how that capital was deployed.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very much envisioned early as kind of a quasi treasury function, really built on arbitrage that was cash futures and options. So even much of what I was doing was really capital structure arbitrage related. So in effect, taking more senior long positions and shorting more subordinated parts of the capital structure and really playing out pricing disparities, bringing an arbitrage approach from a global standpoint to the capabilities. As business went on, they increasingly took on additional kind of credit-related risk, and that's where I had come in in bringing in a high yield bond expertise and being able to trade in riskier parts of capital structures.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I think is remarkable about that period of time is that really we were all committing capital, so we were in a position to be able to commit capital on our own up to certain limits. So there was this concept of limits basically that created the way that we kind of went about the business, but they were pretty generous, especially for a bunch of young folks just starting out in the business. They were really flexible in moving past the treasury markets and into more credit related pieces, so I personally had the opportunity to invest and trade in high yield bonds, municipal bonds, preferred stocks, bankrupt situations. I invested on behalf of the in effect the balance sheet at Cargill, but also on behalf of their insurance companies and had exposure to Cargill's pension plan at the time. So this really became”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to value skills, trading capabilities from some of the best merchants. Cargill was also committing serious sums of capital. Wall Street definitely took notice of what was happening even though it was a relatively young part of Cargill. There was an enormous amount of credibility and an integrity in the way that the business was done that caused a lot of people to take notice.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cargill is a massive global agricultural business. I was the beneficiary of innovation and entrepreneurial view of how they wanted to tackle the financial markets. So they basically were taking some of their best merchants of grain, think of wheat and bean and corn traders who had phenomenal global experience in arbitrage and cash and futures and options and understanding how to trade on the world stage, and they ported them over to the stuffs that was going to start in effect bringing those arbitrage skills to the financial markets, particularly in the treasury bond markets and the foreign exchange markets. Here I was as this young credit analyst on this basically developing group of traders that was kind of an effective quasi treasury function for Cargill at the time. I had the opportunity to learn relatively.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not a particularly appealing bond structure in that it was an increasing rate note that could only go to par and had all the downside. So I still remember the very first bond that was bought. Importantly, that is how I got into finance because they asked me at that point to become in effect a credit analyst on what was a new developing trading desk at Cargill in and around financial instruments. That is where my training and my love for investing really began.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Bob really became a sponsor for me in that organization. And I used the word sponsor very intentionally. He wasn't a mentor. He was somebody who put chits on me. He gave me visibility to senior leadership and put lots of challenging projects in front of me. On a Friday afternoon he called me, he said, hey, Marcia, do you know what a high yield bond is? And I said, Bob, yeah, I kind of hedged my bets. I think so. Send it over, and of course it was paper at the time, so this huge stack of paper shows up on my desk on a Friday afternoon, and I frantically work on it over the course of the weekend and come in Monday morning and present this to Bob Lumpkins and three other colleagues at the time. They went out on my twenty five year old recommendation and bought five million dollars of high yield bonds from what was then Drexel Burnham Lambert. As an aside, I don't remember the actual credit, but I remember”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time I took a math of finance class from one of the math professors there and really delved into understanding the math behind present value and future value internal rates of return and then the applicability to business to investing even to personal life and I was completely hooked That became really my journey to go into economics and finance. I graduated in 1982 so now I'm totally dating myself but an environment with very high inflation, recessionary and not a ton of jobs so I had pretty slim pickings coming out in nineteen eighty two and decided to go right to the University of Minnesota for my MBA. Obviously that would be difficult to do today. When I graduated I was persuaded by Bob Lumpkins who ultimately became vice chair at Cargill to join Cargill. I started as a financial analyst.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No limits thinking, happy to challenge the status quo, first woman mayor in Olivia when I was in high school strategic creative visionary so when I went to college at Gustavus Adolphus College I was completely convinced that I was going to be a pharmacist and go back to Olivia and join my father. I went to a liberal arts school and ran into a wrestling match with organic chemistry and completely lost. I had no idea what was happening in that class. Literally, literally had no idea Ted.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a bit of a non-traditional background and I have to take a step all the way back to my hometown of Olivia, Minnesota. Population two thousand five hundred, about a hundred miles west of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and self proclaimed corn capital of the world. Small town, big ambitions, and a family structure that was very entrepreneurial and leadership oriented. Really, it started around ten years old when I started working with my dad in his drugstore. He was a pharmacist in this small town and I spent most of my evenings and weekends with my father in that drugstore just absorbing everything about the business with my siblings we discussed that over meals he helped me really appreciate the measurability of business but also the importance of exceptional customer service. My mom was her own force of nature.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess on today's show is Marsha Page, the co-founder and executive chair of Varde Partners and founder and CEO of Empowered Capital. Varde is a 30-year-old thirteen billion dollar leading global alternatives firm specializing in credit. Empowered came out of Marsha's personal investing and focuses on accelerating equity for best in class female and underrepresented talent through capital, commitment, and connections. Marsha is one of the few women to have founded and scaled an alternatives firm over three decades. Our conversation spans Marsha's extensive career. We discussed her Minnesota roots, early days at Cargill, founding and scaling of Varday, value investing, and transition of leadership at the firm. We then turn to the latest phase in Marsha's career at Empowered Capital and her efforts to address The industry's diversity gap.”
2023-12-11 · Capital Allocators · Marcia Page – Corn Capitalist with a Velvet Hammer at Värde and MPowered (EP.355) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source