Drew Williamson: Navigating Wall Street's March Madness
It was early March and a financial hurricane was quickly gathering strength, hovering just outside the framework of anything the United States, and indeed the world, had ever seen before. Oklahoma City’s Drew Williamson was in Denver, having dinner with renowned investor Byron Wien, the venerable 87-year-old vice chairman of Blackstone. The city was in full swing. Normal. Restaurants were full and the airport was busy. The idea that a global pandemic was underway was something the two men were beginning view as more than a possibility; it was steadily becoming a probability. Its financial repercussions would spread as swiftly as the virus itself.
The last week of February had provided the initial round of volatility for markets, with the Dow Jones Average dropping 4,000 points over the course of a few days, marking the sixth time that had happened since 2008. “Having seen this five times before, people had a conditioned response to ‘buy the dip,’ but to me, for whatever reason, this one felt different,” says Drew Williamson, senior vice president – wealth management with UBS, a Swiss private bank and the world’s largest wealth manager. The week of March 2 was, as he puts it, “interesting and very busy.” That was still in the ‘before times,’ and the United States had yet to implement the near-total lockdown Americans experienced from St. Patrick’s Day until Memorial Day, more than 60 days in some states.
Less than two weeks would pass before March 16, the day the Wall Street Journal calls “the day coronavirus brought the financial system to the brink.” With the Dow Jones Industrials dropping a record breaking 3000 points that Monday after suffering multiple 2000 point drops the previous week, few realize how close it came to going over the edge entirely. Before that fateful drop, a series of increasingly destabilizing events had been steadily occurring, one after the other, like waves crashing against the shore. “Nobody’s portfolio was fully prepared for this, but having investments aligned with client time horizons and diversified across asset classes surely helped buffer volatility,” Williamson says.
By March 12, Williamson was trying to keep clients calm. “That was when the first clear signs of panic ensued. Buyers were nowhere to be found and sellers were taking huge markdowns to get out of stocks.
“I literally found myself using the “Trading Places” analogy with clients, describing the stock market like the scene where Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy had cornered the OJ market…panicked people, clamouring to sell and only a few buyers (Dan and Eddie) willing to step up. Of course, Dan and Eddie had inside information, so it was easy for them to buy at low prices. This was the first day I nudged a few clients to step into the market and buy, as buying into fear-driven selling is usually how you get stocks at the best prices,” he says. “March Madness wasn’t really cancelled in 2020, it just happened on Wall Street, instead of the basketball court.”
Williamson, whose career in wealth management and finance spans three decades, has surely seen his share of market irregularities, and his vast experience allows him to calmly assess the situation and maneuver his clients safely through the choppy waters. “Many clients are multi-generational families,” he says. As part of UBS’s elite Private Wealth Management Group, Williamson’s niche is high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients.
In 2008 and 2009, Williamson notes, the financial crisis lasted the better part of nine months, and “We sort of got a preview in late spring of 2008,” he says. “The market then held itself together until late September, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.” This was the moment things went from global financial stress to full-blown international emergency. “The massive global unwind started and lasted six months. The S&P dropped 50 percent, which is worse than what happened in March, except it was over the course of six months versus less than one month. The 2020 downturn started the last Monday in February and kept going almost non-stop, until a reversal on March 24th.”
Williamson is laser focused and competitive, some might say even obsessive. He’s nearly unflappable. March 2020 surprised him but did not catch him off guard. “In my career, that time period was as intense as anything I’ve experienced. It was also liberating and, in a way, redeeming, because it reinforced the importance of the advisor’s role in a client’s life. These types of deep client interactions are what I enjoy most about my career,” Williamson says, on the heels of roller-coaster weeks filled with very long days and uncertainty in the market like we’ve rarely experienced before.
Of course the trigger for March’s marathon of market volatility was something none of us could have predicted, COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic. “Normally, my career is interesting, but I wouldn’t always say it’s dramatic,” he says. In fact, drama is something to avoid in private wealth management.
Williamson, a former endurance athlete with three Ironman® triathlons under his belt, is circumspect when asked if his years of training helped him to ride out weeks of grueling ups and downs, remaining focused as always on the fiscal wellbeing of his 60+ clients. “It’s hard to say which drives what. Was I drawn to endurance sports because I’m driven, almost borderline compulsive, or did I become more focused as I competed? Hard to say, probably some of both.”
That competitive streak is what set Williamson on his career path. As a kid growing up in Noble, Oklahoma, a small town just south of Norman, Williamson enjoyed the kind of hometown upbringing most people wax nostalgic about. His father was a brakeman for the Santa Fe Railroad and his mother an office manager for the University of Oklahoma’s Geological Survey. Life was placid and sweet. One day, a teenage Williamson bought a set of golf clubs at a garage sale, on a whim. “I paid $50 for those clubs. I bought them with lawn-mowing money and started hitting golf balls in the pasture. It was perfect – I could play alone and golf worked for my obsessive/competitive side,” he says, laughing.
Following his lead, some of Williamson’s buddies developed an interest in golf, and in the mid-1980s, Noble High School’s golf team was founded. That’s not all. “In 1985, my junior year, Noble won the state 4A golf championship,” Williamson says. The town threw a parade. A couple of years later, his golf clubs won him a scholarship to Oklahoma City University, where the rest of the world opened up to him, and he stepped boldly into his future. “OCU was a great decision for me and led to a great education and connections that have endured for over 30 years.”
“Today, I am trying to pay that forward,” he says. He and his OCU fraternity brothers, including Chris Harrison, producer and star of ‘The Bachelor,’ are working together to fund and build a new chapter house at OCU, where he has also endowed the Meinders Scholars Fund, in honor of Herman Meinders support and scholarship programs that he benefitted from while at OCU. Drew also enjoys supporting Fields and Futures toward building sports complexes for OKC schools, and, as an avid arts enthusiast and collector, he was also involved with a naming gift for Oklahoma Contemporary Art Museum.
photos by Kennon Bryce