James Charnley

President and Registered Principal of Water Street Advisers

I founded Water Street Advisers in 1994 to provide an efficient value-investing capacity to the insurance market.   I bring 35 years financial market experience to the venture, with a consistant record for creating strong and growing businesses in the fields of finance, banking, insurance, and investment management.   

The operating direction of Water Street Advisers is based on a technical appraisal of an inadequacy existant in current investment management practices.  My grounding for making this appraisal comes from hands-on experience in evaluating financial markets and their participants,  that experience arising from stints as director of research for a large bank, manager and principal of ventures to create new insurance, securities brokerage, investment management, banking and mortgage banking businesses, financial manager to a series of commercial and non-profit organizations and as an economist serving as Special Assistant to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the early 1980’s. 

This technical appraisal has caused me to rewrite several generally-accepted processes for evaluating differences in performance among investment managers and their strategies, and has resulted in the publication of three patents for  procedures to correct for errors and omissions in those processes.   It also generated a book  -- Why Watch M1? -- that identifies a pervasive and quantifiable causal relationship between the conduct of monetary policy and securities-market volatility.

In addition to Water Street, I currently serve as financial manager and controller for several Boston-area 501(c)(3) non-profits, instituting financial and operational controls to increase the efficiency of their cash-flow management, financial planning, accounting, investment administration and auditing processes.

link to detailed chronology