Scott Minerd, Guggenheim Partners’ Investment Chief, Dies at Age 63

Guggenheim Chief Executive

Mark Walter

credited him with designing the organization, systems and procedures that helped Guggenheim rise from a startup to a manager of more than $218 billion in total assets and 900 employees.

Mr. Minerd served as the public face of Guggenheim. In that role, he was among Wall Street’s more prominent personalities, making frequent appearances on television and maintaining an active presence on social media to discuss markets and investments, often in blunt terms.

“That sound you hear is the Fed breaking something,” he wrote in October in a message to clients, warning that the central bank’s campaign to raise interest rates was causing dislocations in fixed-income and foreign-exchange markets.

Mr. Minerd was a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets and an adviser to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mr. Minerd is survived by his husband Eloy Mendez.

“As an asset manager, I’ve come to view conventional wisdom as the surest path to investment underperformance,” Mr. Minerd wrote in a biographical summary.

Mr. Minerd grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He also took courses at the University of Chicago and described himself as a monetarist.

He worked as a dealer in currencies, bonds and structured securities at Merrill Lynch,

Morgan Stanley

and CS First Boston in the 1980s and 1990s.

At age 37, feeling burned out, he left Wall Street and moved to Los Angeles. “I walked away from extremely large offers on Wall Street,” he told Bloomberg in 2017. “I realized this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for life, this was it.” After joining what became Guggenheim Partners, he worked in a Santa Monica, Calif., office overlooking the ocean.

Mr. Minerd was a conservative willing to embrace some ideas from the left and seek middle ground.

In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he took aim at elite universities, including the University of Pennsylvania. “These schools have huge endowments, and why are they not focusing their endowment on advancing a cause of essentially free education or at least education that provides complete support for people below certain income levels?” he asked. Mr. Minerd said he wouldn’t make donations going to “bricks and mortar and making the place look better when people who would be qualified to come there can’t afford to do it. And, of course, if we had more equal access to education, it would help address some of the issues around race and poverty.”

Referring to his bulky bodybuilder’s physique, he once told a Wall Street Journal reporter that when people asked about “key man” risk at Guggenheim and wondered what would happen if Mr. Minerd was hit by a truck, his staff members would respond, “Do you mean what would happen to the truck?”

One of his favorite charities was Union Rescue Mission, which provides food, shelter, training and other services to homeless people in Los Angeles County.

Andy Bales,

chief executive of Union Rescue Mission, recalled meeting Mr. Minerd around 2008, when the mission was in poor financial shape and in danger of having to sell one of its sites. “He told me that God was tapping him on the shoulder, telling him to do more for others,” the Rev. Bales said. Mr. Minerd ended up donating more than $5 million to the mission to allow it to expand services.

Mr. Minerd was often seen with a rescue dog he called Grace, who accompanied him to the office and on trips.

His work schedule was punishing. “He was up early for East Coast customers and went late for his West Coast customers,” the Rev. Bales said.

Write to Charley Grant at charles.grant@wsj.com and James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com