Mark Burgess
In a normal year, Jim Stillwagon would be flying around the U.S., hanging out on Netflix Inc.’s studio lots and asking hard questions of Silicon Valley management teams. He would be driving up and down Interstate 95 between his home in Bethesda, Md., and his Baltimore office rather than sharing his workspace with his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
In a normal year, the mutual fund Stillwagon manages — the TD Global Entertainment & Communications Fund — might not be up by 45%. But 2020 has been far from normal, and Stillwagon is
Investment Executive’s Mutual Fund Manager of the Year.
Stillwagon joined the TD fund’s subadvisor, Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group Inc., as vice-president in 2017, and took over as the fund’s portfolio manager (PM) in November 2019. “They don’t always recommend starting your PM career in the middle of a global pandemic,” he says. However, there’s plenty to recommend the $1.6-billion TD fund’s performance.