Jonathan E. Lewis

Jonathan E. Lewis

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New York

Chief Investment Officer

Jonathan is the Chief Investment Officer for the U.S. division, chairs the Fixed Income Investment Committee, and is a member of the Management Committee and the Tactical Asset Allocation Committee. Jonathan manages fixed income portfolios for high net worth individuals and institutions.

Jonathan was a co-founder of Samson Capital Advisors LLC. Samson was a privately-owned investment management firm that was founded in 2004 by senior investment professionals from OFFITBANK, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan. Prior to its acquisition by Fiera Capital, Samson managed over $7 billion in assets in customized fixed income for affluent families and their foundations, endowments and corporations. He was a Managing Principal, Chief Investment Officer and a member of the Management Committee. As chair of its investment committee, he supervised the design, development, and implementation of the investment and risk management processes central to the firm’s approach to taxable and tax-efficient investing. In this position, he designed the quarterly planning process that serves as a foundation of the firm’s longer-term outlook, risk management approach, and the quality control techniques used in its peer review process. His work in currency investing led Samson to launch its first mutual fund. His comments regularly appear in The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Bloomberg News and he has appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNBC, and PBS’ Nightly Business Report.

Prior to Samson, he was the Chief Fixed Income Strategist at OFFIT Investment Group (formerly OFFITBANK), which he joined in 1999. Jonathan also chaired its Portfolio Strategy Committee. In that capacity, he served as Managing Director of Fixed Income for Evergreen Private Asset Management, which managed $18 billion in private client assets. He also served as a member of Evergreen’s Customized Fixed Income Management Team, overseeing more than $100 billion in fixed income assets.

From 1988 through 1999, Jonathan was a Portfolio Manager and Vice President with Skandia Asset Management, where he served as Head of Fixed Income, and a member of the firm’s Global Fixed Income Investment Policy Committee for the firm’s insurance related portfolios. From 1986 to 1988, Jonathan was a money market trader at Dean Witter Reynolds.

He served as part of the congressionally mandated independent panel that reviewed the CIA’s venture capital operation, In-Q-Tel, in 2001.  From 2003-2004, he was part of a compensation reform study which was presented to the CIA Director and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  He was awarded the CIA’s Agency Seal Medal for this work.  He was also a part of a 2008 study of private sector analytical practices and how they could inform the Intelligence Community’s own capabilities. In 2015, he was a member of a four-person Business Executives for National Security Task Force which reviewed domestic security capabilities to protect the US from terrorism. 

He is the author of Spy Capitalism: Itek and the CIA (Yale University Press, 2002) and the co-author of CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell’s memoirs: Reflections of a Cold Warrior (Yale University Press, 1996).   He is a member of the Investment Committee of The Phi Beta Kappa Foundation and served as a trustee of the Fellows of Phi Beta Kappa. He is a former trustee of the Scarsdale Board of Education. He served as President of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation of Westchester County and remains on its board of chancellors.

Jonathan holds an MA from New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and an MBA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.