Erik Townsend welcomes Luke Gromen to MacroVoices. Erik and Luke discuss:
Luke Gromen began his career in the mid-1990s in the Research Department at Midwest Research before moving over to institutional equity sales and becoming a partner. While in sales, Luke was a founding editor of Midwest’s widely-read weekly summary (“Heard in the Midwest”) for the firm’s clients, in which he aggregated and combined proprietary research from Midwest with inputs from other sources.
In 2006, Luke left FTN Midwest to become a founding partner of Cleveland Research Company. At CRC, Luke continued to work in sales and edit CRC’s flagship weekly research summary piece (“Straight from the Source”) for the firm’s customers.
In 2014, Luke left Cleveland Research to found FFTT, LLC (“Forest for the Trees”), a macro/thematic research firm catering to institutions and high net worth individuals that aggregates a wide variety of macroeconomic, thematic and sector trends in an unconventional manner to identify investable developing economic bottlenecks for our customers, as we have found that excess investment returns tend to accrue to economic bottlenecks over time.
Our vision for FFTT was to create a firm that would address the opportunity we saw created by applying what customers and former colleagues consistently described as our “unique ability to put the big picture pieces together” during a time when we saw an increasing “silo-ing” of perspectives occurring on Wall Street and in corporate America.
Luke Gromen is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and received his MBA from Case Western Reserve University. He earned the CFA designation in 2003.
