Seattle-based investment brokerage McAdams Wright Ragen Inc. has opened a Spokane office, hiring a group of brokers who previously worked in the Wells Fargo Advisors office here.

Tom Guthrie, branch manager of the Spokane office, says the firm is starting with seven employees here, five of whom are investment brokers. He expects the number of employees to increase to up to 20 people within two years.

The firm has leased 6,000 square feet of office space on the 19th floor of the Bank of America Financial Center, at 601 W. Riverside, for the Spokane office. Guthrie says tenant improvements currently are under way there, and the firm expects to move into that space within three months. Meantime, the firm's seven employees here are working out of a temporary office space on the building's 16th floor.

The Spokane office is the seventh that McAdams Wright Ragen has opened. Its other offices in Washington state are located in Seattle, Bellevue, Anacortes, Mount Vernon, and Yakima. It also has an office in Portland. In all, the company employs about 170 people, about half of whom are brokers.

McAdams Wright Ragen President and CEO Scott McAdams says the 13-year-old firm has been looking to open an office in Spokane for about 10 years, but had been waiting until it found what it considered to be the right manager.

"It's probably the last city in Washington state that we really had a serious hole in terms of not having an office," McAdams says.

Guthrie says he agreed to manage the Spokane office of McAdams Wright Ragen because he wanted to work with a smaller investment firm, relatively speaking, and he agrees with the firm's investment approach.

"Rather than being with the big banks, what we want to do is one thing really well, and that is to manage stock and bond portfolios without the peripherals," he says.

In addition to Guthrie, other investment brokers who are working in the Spokane office are Scott Bullock, Heather Cote, Dick Peterson, and Jeff Peterson.

McAdams describes the firm as having a "value contrarian investor" approach, meaning it looks for investment opportunities in companies with sound fundamentals and in industries that are out of favor with most investors.

Guthrie likens value contrarian investing to a clock, saying the company is looking for investments in companies that are at 6 o'clock and poised to start moving up, rather than companies that are at their peak, or 12 o'clock.

McAdams says, "Markets like Spokane have high concentrations of those kinds of people (value investors)."

In addition to its brokers, McAdams Wright Ragen employs six internal analysts, who research companies in specific industries, following them closely and making buy-sell recommendations. McAdams says the company is looking to add more analysts, and while there aren't specific plans to add people with that expertise in the Spokane market, he doesn't rule out doing so in the future.

In general, he says, "We try to start small and take our time and grow it organically."