Joe Frohna

Mr. Joseph A.
Frohna, CFA MBA, is a Founding Principal & Portfolio Manager at 1492 Capital Management LLC.
He has managed public and private accounts for institutional and individual investors since 1997, successfully guiding clients through both bull and bear markets.
A founding principal of the firm and lead manager of the 1492 Small Cap Growth strategy and Co-PM on the Small Cap Core Alpha and Small Cap Dynamic Hedge strategies, he focuses on finding small cap companies with superior growth characteristics and deploys a thematic approach to leverage 1492’s research to identify as many companies participating in a particular high growth area of the economy.
Prior to founding 1492 Capital Management, LLC, Mr. Frohna was the founder and CEO of Cortina Asset Management and lead portfolio manager of the Cortina Small Cap Growth strategy.
Under his leadership, Cortina grew to nearly $2 billion in small cap assets under management in less than three years.
He began his investment career in 1994 at Salomon Brothers in New York where he worked in the Sales and Trading division.
In 1995, he joined Firstar Investment Research and Management Company, now known as U.S.
Bancorp Asset Management as a generalist analyst and in 1997 was promoted to portfolio manager of the nationally recognized First American Small Cap Growth Opportunities Fund (formerly the Firstar Small Cap Growth and Firstar Microcap Fund) and separate institutional and individual small cap growth portfolios.
He also served on the Alumni Board of Governors at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business from 2010-2016.
He received a B.B.A.
in Accounting from the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater and an M.B.A.
in Finance from the University of Michigan.
He successfully completed both the CFA and CPA exams and prior to his career in investment management, he practiced as a licensed CPA with Arthur Andersen & Co.