Barry M. Abramson

Barry M. Abramson, CFA, is a Senior Advisor to Saber Partners, LLC. As a top-ranked financial analyst, he has followed the North American utility industry for more than 35 years. Mr. Abramson has provided in-depth research on electric, gas and water utilities, and pipeline companies. Following a 25-year career on Wall Street as an equity securities analyst for major firms like Merrill Lynch, Prudential Securities, PaineWebber and UBS Securities, he went into money management as a sell-side equity analyst and later as a portfolio manager.

At Saber Partners, LLC, Mr. Abramson uses his broad industry knowledge and equity investor perspective to advise companies and regulatory bodies about strategic moves, financing, mergers and acquisitions, dividend policy, and other corporate actions. He provides unbiased “second opinions” to companies and regulators about major strategic moves that are proposed by others. Because of his broad, in-depth experience with investors, Mr. Abramson is also uniquely qualified to advise CEOs and CFOs of utility and energy companies about dealing with divestiture threats from institutional investors that are concerned about climate change.

During his Wall Street years, Mr. Abramson was ranked as one of the top utility industry analysts 11 times in the annual poll conducted by Institutional Investor Magazine, including twice being ranked as the #1 analyst in his sector. He was known for his knowledge of the nuclear power sector and also for his early beliefs (in the early 1990’s) that deregulation of power production and retail customer choice were inevitable.

After leaving Wall Street, he worked for 7 years as a Senior Analyst for a large mutual fund company, Gabelli Asset Management. He was involved in three large utility equity mutual funds, totaling more than $1 billion in assets. He later worked for 7 years as a Senior Equity Portfolio manager for the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management, where he managed a multi-billion fund that invested in North American utilities and pipeline companies.

By virtue of covering a large number of companies in the same sectors for such a long time, he has had the opportunity to meet with and build relationships with many of the senior managements in the utility and pipeline industries. He also has met with and developed professional relationships with numerous state and federal regulators over the years.

During his long career covering utilities and pipelines from an equity investor perspective, Mr. Abramson has analyzed numerous utility and pipeline industry mergers, spin-offs, asset acquisitions and divestitures. In the electric utility sector, he has evaluated the strategic decisions made by senior managements, such as whether to remain in power generation or divest power plants, whether to divest nuclear units or buy and/or build more nuclear assets, whether to divest electric transmission assets or invest more heavily in electric transmission. In the gas utility sector, he has evaluated decisions made by gas utilities to invest more heavily in natural gas transmission and in natural gas reserves. In the pipeline sector, he has analyzed strategic decisions by gas pipeline companies to move into liquids pipelines and into gas gathering and processing, and in the other direction he evaluated moves by oil pipeline companies to invest heavily in gas pipelines.

Mr. Abramson has seen the renewable energy industry in North America from its birth in the late 1970’s to its current state as a predominant source of new electric generating capacity. He also has seen natural gas return to being the dominant fossil fuel for new generation in North America.

Mr. Abramson is a native of Brooklyn, New York. He graduated 8th in a class of 866 from New Utrecht High School. With the help of generous financial aid, he went on to earn a B.A. in Economics from Yale University. He also has Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) certification from the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts.