Top 40 Under 40: A Team Approach to Providing Advice

No. 16: James Odorczuk

Firm: J.P. Morgan Securities

AUM: $1.11 billion

Location: Boston

Age: 39

Note: This profile is part of a special series devoted to On Wall Street’s Top 40 Under 40 ranking for 2012. Every day we take a look at an advisor who made the list to find out the secrets of their success.

J.P. Morgan Securities advisor James Odorczuk says he always has an opinion.

“That’s what clients want,” Odorczuk says. “You can’t just ‘set it and forget it.’ A lot of clients are unhappy with a passive investment style.”

Odorczuk, who says he is “very tactical” when it comes to asset management, has plenty of help when it comes to shaping and expressing those opinions. He leads his team along with Ross Dolgoff.

“I was in Lehman Brothers’ associates’ class of 1999 and he was in the class of 2000,” Odorczuk says. “We knew each other because Ross had been in business school with my wife. We set up an informal arrangement in 2002 and formalized it in 2003.”

In 2005 the team moved to Bear Stearns, which was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2008. The pair are the senior members of the JORD Group.

Today, the team consists of seven people, “soon to be eight,” according to Odorczuk. “Some of them are early stage advisors, while others are engaged in marketing and prospecting,” he says. “It’s a selling point for us, having a talented group on the team.”

The team also provides checks and balances in making investment decisions. “It happens daily,” Odorczuk says. “We might be discussing a certain segment of our municipal bond portfolio. Do we hold? Swap? Go long?”

By considering various viewpoints, the team decides what decision makes the most sense.

“Recently, we looked at the current macro and political situation and decided to sell some assets on the fixed income side that we had purchased years ago,” Odorczuk says as an example. “We realized gains and positioned clients for the beginning of the next cycle.”

Once Odorczuk and his teammates make such decisions, they don’t leave early to play golf, as he puts it. “We keep our hands directly in the game,” he says. “We may make mistakes, but we don’t compound them. We’ll use stop-loss orders and other techniques to keep our exposure down if something is not working. Being wrong is one thing, but we don’t want to be very wrong.”