Wall Street Transcript Interview with Frederick J. Ruopp, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Chelsea Management: U.S. High-Quality Large Cap Stocks are Current Sweet Spot for Investors

67 WALL STREET, New York - December 17, 2012 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published its Best Investment Strategy Interviews of 2012 Report. This special feature contains expert commentary through in-depth interviews with highly experienced Money Managers. The full issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.

Topics covered: Investment Strategies - Large Cap Investing - Investing in Emerging Markets - Investing in Energy - Value Investing - Downside Protection With Upside Participation - Macroeconomic Trends

Companies include: Dow Chemical Co. (DOW), Google Inc. (GOOG), QUALCOMM Inc. (QCOM), Apple Inc. (AAPL), HJ Heinz Co. (HNZ), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (TMO), Chevron Corp. (CVX), Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC), Devon Energy Corporation (DVN), International Business Machine (IBM), Emerson Electric Co. (EMR), Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR), US Bancorp (USB)

In the following excerpt from the Best Investment Strategy Interviews of 2012 Report, a portfolio manager with 50 years of experience discusses his investing methodology for investors:

TWST: How do you describe your investment philosophy and what are some elements you believe make it unique?

Mr. Ruopp: Let me start by saying that we think the U.S. is in really a unique position right now. We have become, because of the oil and gas fracking, really a low-cost energy producer, and our costs are much below most of Europe and most of Asia. Saudi Arabia is a different story, of course. And additionally, we've just come through a recession, which people have been trimming down their workforces for four years, becoming more efficient as a country producing more goods and services with fewer people. And you combine all that together, and you combine the fact that we are still the world's leader in technology.

We have probably 80 of the 100 leading universities here in the U.S. The great research universities are mostly here in the U.S., and we still have a high relative degree of freedom in this country, freedom to think and organize and to plan to work for good. So we think this country has become again highly competitive in the world stage, and we think the outlook is very bright. We obviously have this fiscal problem, trillions of dollars of debt, which somehow has to be slowed in terms of the growth in the budget deficits and has to be gradually reversed over a period of time. But we are assuming that can be done by rational people, and we assume that this country, at the end of the day, is governed by rational people. So for us, the outlook is good.

I mentioned that we look a lot at things like balance sheets. Balance sheets may not count too much in good times, but in bad times it makes all the difference, particularly in a sector like the banking sector. Coming into 2007, we had almost no financial stocks in our portfolio. We felt very uneasy about what was going on in the financial world, the mortgage world and the fact that everybody was leveraging up...

For more of this interview and many others visit the Wall Street Transcript - a unique service for investors and industry researchers - providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs, portfolio managers and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.