26 BARRON’S October 26, 2020
FUND PROFILE
Talking With David Wallack
Portfolio Manager, T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Value
AValue
Fund
Reopens
Photograph byJULIEN JAMES
D
avid Wallack can attribute much of his suc-
cess as a fund manager to his love for his-
tory. He had such abiding interest in how
medieval cathedrals were built that, after
graduating from Connecticut College with a
bachelor’s degree in history, he pursued
stone carving for a couple of years.
But Wallack quickly realized that stone carvers
would always have to look for work. While working at
Harvard University’s fine arts library, he developed an
interest in stocks—and discovered that his grandfather
and great-uncles were stock investors in the 1920s. His
grandfather survived the 1929 crash and remained an
investor for the rest of his life. However, one of his great-
uncles lost a significant sum and was never the same
after that, according to family lore.
“Among other things, that cemented in me a respect
for how much money one can lose in stocks. I spend a
great deal of time thinking about what can go wrong,”
says Wallack, who graduatedin 1990 with an M.B.A.
from Carnegie Mellon University.
That awareness of risk—along with the patience of a
stone carver—influences how the Baltimore-based Wal-
lack manages the $11.5 billionT. Rowe Price Mid-Cap
Valuefund (ticker: TRMCX), which, until recently, had
been closed to new investors for more than a decade. It
has beaten both the Russell Midcap Value index and its
category on a one-, three-, five-, and 15-year basis and has
a below-average expense ratio of 0.78%. Morningstar,
which rates it a four-star gold-medalist fund, named Wal-
lack domestic-stock fund manager of the year in 2016.
Wallack,now 60, has worked at T. Rowe for 30 years,
joining first as a natural-resource and utilities analyst.
He became the Mid-Cap Value fund’s portfolio manager
in 2001. For 14 of the past 20 years, he closed the fund
to new investors, saying there were few investment op-
By DEBBIE CARLSON