Meet Portfolio Manager Shawn Reynolds

I started my career back in the 80s. I got my original undergraduate degree in engineering and then I went on and got a graduate degree in petroleum geology and started my life as a petroleum geologist kind of exploring in the mid-continent of the United States and eventually around the world.

I got interested in engineering and geology when I was in high school.

When I realized outside of a barn door of my house, we had a core, a rock core that had been sitting there for years and years and I had never paid attention to it and finally asked my father what that was about and he said, well, that came from an oil well that was drilled on a small piece of property that we had in Southern Illinois of all places, which is not necessarily a hotbed of oil and gas.

But I got so interested in trying to figure out what that rock core was trying to tell us with regards to the history of the earth that I eventually became a geologist.

I went back and got an MBA and got into Wall Street originally as an investment banker, then as a research analyst, and then finally came over to VanEck back in 2005.

One of the greatest things about what I get to do is really travel the world and see how all these really important industries, energy, mining, agriculture, that are just the underpinnings to all economies in all societies, how they work and how they thrive and how they create value for equity investors.

And what we've really focused on is the business model and the team that's pushing that business model because a lot of technologies do exist and believe in innovation and that those technologies will exist as time goes on. But you need to have the teams that can bring them to a commercial scale and therefore to a public equity scale and make it investable for everyone for them to really work out over time.