Who Is Brian Friedman?

During his first visit to Israel in 1984, a teenage Brian Friedman couldn’t help but notice two things. One was the dynamic, vibrant, enterprising spirit of the Israeli people. The other was the plummeting of the shekel, which seemed to lose half its value during the six weeks of Brian’s tour.

That summer saw the worst economic crisis in Israel’s history, with hyperinflation of nearly 500% and the collapse of the country’s socialized economy and its financial institutions.  But when Brian returned a couple years later, as a college student spending a year at Tel-Aviv University, he made it his goal to dive into the history of the Israeli economy through his year-long independent study.

As the years went by, Brian witnessed first-hand Israel’s economic rebirth under a wave of privatization and other systemic reforms, a wave that continues to this day.

Brian’s analysis of the economies of Israel and other developed nations continued after he earned his BA in Economics at George Washington University. He served as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution and an economic analyst at the Law and Economics Consulting Group before earning an MBA in Finance and Accounting at the University of Chicago. During those years, Brian began to develop his unique understanding of the correlation between a country’s strong rule of law (as in such nations as Israel and the U.S.), its development of a  financial system that allows for freer flows of capital, and the resulting innovations in finance, business, and technology that bring prosperity to such a country.

Brian applied this understanding of international and domestic economics to his career in wealth management. Since returning to his hometown of Denver and co-founding GHP Investment Advisors in 1999, Brian has seen his investment philosophy weather several international financial crises, resulting in GHPIA’s growth into a firm that, at this writing, manages just over $2 billion in assets.

Over the years, Brian has continued to monitor Israel’s economic evolution, to visit Israel often, and to meet with Israeli leaders in politics, academia, and business. So he was attuned to the moment in 2010 when Israel’s promotion to developed-economy indices offered the opportune time to launch a fund allowing American investors access to successful Israeli companies. In the process of nurturing Israel Investment Advisors over the years, Brian cultivated not just new clients but a community of American supporters of Israel.

Brian’s attributes – his lifelong study of Israel’s economy, his understanding of international economics, his time-tested investment guidelines, his decades of experience in finance, and his relationships within a network of supporters of Israel from Los Angeles to Jerusalem – make him uniquely poised among American investment managers to offer American investors insights into the opportunities available to them in Israeli markets. His own passion for Israel guides him to make investment choices designed to benefit IIA’s American community of individual investors and philanthropies while supporting Israel’s businesses, economy, and institutions.

To learn more about Brian, click here.