Buy-side profile
Experience,
humour and
humility takes you
a long way!
Mats Rywe
Equity trader at SEB Investment Management AB
Mats Rywe, Equity trader at SEB Investment Management in Stockholm has an impressive
27 years’ service with the firm. We caught up with Mats at our recent 9th ATF Nordic road-
show in Stockholm where he shares with us his personal insight to his career in the early
days and his thoughts in general having worked within Equity trading for over two decades.
After my military service and four years
of university studies in Behavioral
Science, I started in 1981 to work at
Persson & Co, a small brokerage firm in
Stockholm, Sweden.
After two years I moved to Alfred Berg
fund commission, where I stayed until
1990 before heading off to start the
centralized trading desk at SEB Funds in
September 1990.
I started to trade for one or two so
called ‘Allemansfonder - containing just
Swedish large cap names.
Then this business exploded and we,
plus other Swedish banks started up
lots of funds for example Continental
European funds, North American,
sector funds etc. In the late 1990’s
when the Asian markets started to
18
become frightfully volatile, our local
fund managers in our Hong Kong office
requested the need for more live time
trading. I was therefore asked to move
to Hong Kong to trade real time in Asia
and Japan.
After four very interesting years, I moved
home again in 2001 to start trading for
our “new” Russian and Eastern European
funds.
Five years ago I was also asked to be
responsible for all FX trading that goes
on at SEB Investment Management.
Trading for “traditionally stock picking”
fund managers has always appealed to
me, giving me the opportunity to locate
www.buysideintel.com
liquidity and negotiate large blocks
direct with my counter parts out there.
Unfortunately this side of the fund
management business has shrunk over
the last couple years due to several
reasons so I, like everyone else on the
buy side, must adapt to the new ways of
managing funds and therefore also new
and more sophisticated ways of trading.
But I still believe that this kind of
liquidity finding, besides adding some
Alpha to the PM are also well in line with
Best Ex.
The reason why I have stayed within
trading instead of maybe fund
management is that when my markets
close, my working day also closes!
Winter 2017