Who is Wasif Latif?
Wasif Latif is Co-Founder, President, and Chief Investment Officer of Sarmaya Partners, an investment firm focused on secular thematic investing, and the portfolio manager of the actively managed LENS ETF. He has nearly 30 years of experience managing money professionally across individual stocks, multi-asset portfolios, mutual funds, ETFs, high-net-worth accounts, and insurance company assets. He started his career at Deutsche Bank in New York, then spent 13 years at USAA in San Antonio, where he managed the company’s equity and multi-asset mutual funds and helped build its ETF platform. Latif is the author of the “Return to Tangibles” thesis, which argues that the world is shifting away from a decade-long focus on digital, intangible assets and back toward energy, metals, commodities, and physical infrastructure.
Early Interest and Deutsche Bank
Latif traces his interest in markets to growing up in the 1980s watching films like Trading Places and Wall Street. The real business, he admits, is less dramatic than the movies, but it hooked him all the same.
He joined Deutsche Bank in New York City right out of graduate school, working in the asset management and private banking divisions. There he learned the mechanics of the business: bottom-up equity security selection, portfolio management, top-down asset allocation, and manager due diligence. He ran the bank’s risk-based model portfolios, ranging from conservative, fixed-income-heavy mixes to 100 percent equity, and traded currency forwards to hedge fixed-income portfolios held by non-U.S. clients.
Building an Investment Career at USAA
Latif was recruited to San Antonio, where he and his wife raised their two sons. The boys were born in New York, he likes to say, but grew up as Texans. He spent about 15 years in San Antonio, 13 of them at USAA.
At USAA, he managed equity and multi-asset mutual funds that held stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, and alternatives, including one fund that held thousands of securities across the U.S. and international markets. His team also managed the equity portion of USAA’s insurance pool. He helped launch a global hedged equity portfolio that used options and collars, and he helped build the company’s ETF platform.
USAA taught him two lasting lessons. The first was how to think as a big-picture risk manager at a time when asset allocation was becoming its own discipline. The second was the company’s culture of doing the right thing for clients even when nobody is looking. Later roles at other firms added experience in marketing, sales, and communications.
Founding Sarmaya Partners
Latif says he got his entrepreneurial streak from his mother’s side of the family, which ran many businesses, some successful and some not. His father’s side valued a degree, a job, and a stable life. For most of his career, he followed the second path, but in every role he found himself pushing beyond his job description to try a new idea or product. Those efforts, when his bosses gave him room to run, usually turned into his biggest wins.
When he left USAA, he rolled his 401(k) into a self-directed IRA and asked himself how he actually wanted to manage his own money. The answer was not by tracking a benchmark. That question became the foundation of Sarmaya Partners, which he co-founded with his partner Carl. The firm runs concentrated, outcome-focused portfolios that are not tied to an index.
The Return to Tangibles Thesis
Latif’s investment approach is built on secular themes and market regimes that last seven to twelve years. His research shows a pattern: oil and gold in the 1970s, Japan in the 1980s, internet stocks in the 1990s, emerging markets and commodities in the 2000s, and mega-cap tech after the financial crisis. No theme lasts forever, and the next one usually begins in the shadow of the last one, before most of the market notices.
In the summer of 2020, with oil priced as if the world would never need it again, Latif concluded that a new commodity supercycle was beginning. He calls it the Return to Tangibles. The name is a play on the accounting distinction between tangible and intangible assets. For more than a decade, markets rewarded companies with intangible assets. Latif believes the focus is now shifting back to physical ones.
How Latif Operates:
Be Different, Not Just Right:
Latif believes the investment industry has become overly focused on consultant-driven style boxes and benchmark tracking. When pay is tied to beating an index, being down 18 percent in a year when the market falls 20 percent counts as a win. Sarmaya Partners is benchmark-agnostic by design. In a crowded industry, he says, you have to be good, and you have to be right, but you also have to be different.
Think in Secular Themes:
Rather than chasing short-term trends, Latif looks for multi-year regimes driven by real catalysts. He studies history to understand why each past theme rose and fell and to spot the next one early. Catalysts matter: China joining the WTO drove the 2000s commodity boom, and pandemic stimulus, the freezing of Russia’s reserves, tariffs, and the AI build-out are driving this one.
Own the Companies, Anchor With Gold:
LENS is primarily an equity portfolio. Latif prefers companies that produce, mine, or service commodities because their cash flow and operating leverage can outperform the commodities themselves over a full cycle. The fund holds energy producers, oil service firms, and companies in natural gas, uranium, copper, platinum, and iron ore, along with gold and silver miners. It also holds a small position in physical gold and silver through ETFs, which Latif sees as a stabilizing anchor against monetary risk.
Transparency as Conviction:
When Sarmaya launched an active ETF, friends warned him that the world would see his holdings every day. His response: if people are copying or trading against his portfolio, that means they are paying attention. He also values the structure itself, since ETFs are transparent, trade throughout the day, and avoid passing one investor’s capital gains on to everyone else, as mutual funds can.
