David M. Darst, CFA®
Managing Director / Chief Investment Officer
David is currently the Chief Investment Officer for Americana Partners. David served for 17 years as a Managing Director and Chief Investment Strategist of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, with responsibility for Asset Allocation and Investment Strategy; was the founding President of the Morgan Stanley Investment Group; and was founding Chairman of the Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Asset Allocation Committee. After 2014, he served for several years as Senior Advisor to and a member of the Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Global Investment Committee. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1996 from Goldman Sachs, where he held Senior Management posts within the Equities Division and earlier, for six years as Resident Manager of their Private Bank in Zurich.
David is the Author of twelve books: (i) The Complete Bond Book (McGraw-Hill); (ii) The Handbook of the Bond and Money Markets (McGraw-Hill); (iii) The Art of Asset Allocation, Second Edition (McGraw-Hill); (iv) Mastering the Art of Asset Allocation (McGraw-Hill); (v) Benjamin Graham on Investing (McGraw-Hill); (vi) The Little Book that Saves Your Assets (John Wiley & Sons), which was ranked on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and Business Week; (vii) Portfolio Investment Opportunities in China (John Wiley & Sons); and (x) Portfolio Investment Opportunities in Precious Metals (John Wiley & Sons). His works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Korean, Italian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Romanian, and Vietnamese. Seapoint Books published David’s eleventh book in 2012 , Voyager 3, containing his creative writing, and in 2016, his twelfth book, Flim-Flam Flora, a children’s book coauthored with his daughter.
David appears as a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, FOX, PBS, and other television channels, and has contributed numerous articles to Barron’s Euromoney, The Money Manager, Forbes.com, The Yale Economic Review, and other publications. He has broadcast and written extensively on asset allocation in the Morgan Stanley biweekly Investment Strategy and Asset Allocation Commentary and in the Firm’s Wealth Management monthly publication, Asset Allocation and Investment Strategy Digest, the predecessors of which he launched in 1997.
David attended Father Ryan High School in Nashville, Tennessee, graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, was awarded a BA degree in Economics from Yale University, and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. David serves on the Investment Committee of the Phi Beta Kappa Foundation and the Advisory Boards of the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom and the Black Rock Arts Foundation. David has lectured extensively at Wharton, Columbia, INSEAD, and New York University Business Schools, and for nine years, David served as a visiting faculty member at Yale College, Yale School of Management, and Harvard Business School. In November 2011, David was inducted by Quinnipiac University in their Business Leaders Hall of Fame. David is a CFA Charterholder and a member of the New York Society of Security Analysts and the CFA Institute.