Lahiji was 12 at the time, but he has been working to make amends ever since. After an entire adolescence of single-minded self-education in the stock market -- “I don’t have much time for girls,” says Lahiji -- the 20-year-old son of Iranian immigrants this month gets his chance to manage some real money. Working out of a bedroom in his parents’ Santa Monica, California, home, Lahiji will co-manage Milwaukee-based Frontier Equity Fund. Says Lahiji, who is suspending his studies at Santa Monica Community College, “I’ve been dreaming about this since I was 11.”
The fund, with a mere $60,000 in assets, needs a lift, to put it mildly. Owners Amy Siesennop, president of the fund, and Joel Blumenschein, who will be Lahiji’s co-manager, acquired it in an estate sale last year. (Siesennop worked for the fund’s previous owner-manager, James Fay.) “It’s arguably the worst mutual fund that’s ever existed,” says Morningstar analyst Jeff Ptak -- $1,000 invested at the fund’s May 1992 inception would have shriveled to $39 by this June.
Why Lahiji? “Can he do any worse?” asks Siesennop.
Lahiji gained media attention earlier this year when he boasted that he had read more than 12,000 annual reports in a 12-month period. He singled out some 160 obscure companies -- such as Female Health Co., a Chicago-based producer of female condoms -- and put them into a model portfolio that according to his Web site has appreciated 118 percent since November. The assertion caught the eye of the SEC, which last month began an informal investigation into its accuracy, Lahiji says. The SEC declines to comment, but Lahiji is back in the good graces of his father, who plans to put about $50,000 of his retirement money into Frontier. “That’s a significant step,” says the son, who won’t be paid his salary -- 0.75 percent of assets -- until the fund tops $3 million. “My best friends next year are going to be chocolate milk and Tums,” he sighs.
