‘Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.’
– Albert Einstein
In an increasingly digitised and connected world, economic and financial market information is abundant. Faster, inclusive access, requiring little more than curiosity, tenacity, and a web browser renders the notion of an ‘information advantage’ increasingly hard to substantiate. Now more than ever before, the advantage comes in how you separate the meaningful from the meaningless; how you organise and prioritise the dataflow. Our skill comes in evaluating the myriad sources of information to better understand the world, so that we may pinpoint the best opportunities in fixed income, and avoid the more serious risks.
Our team averages 18 years industry experience and an average tenure of 7 years. Experience has shaped the way we invest, a culmination of these decades of hands on investment experience, brought together in a singularly focused process aimed at delivering portfolio solutions that help meet the needs of so many investors today – consistent, absolute returns with underlying capital preservation.
Research and analysis
Our allocation begins with an analysis of key global economic trends. We develop our view during quarterly economic roundtable sessions with leading members of the fixed income community.
Next, we consider country specific factors and market expectations, before moving on to identify specific opportunities.
Capital preservation
At our heart is an unwavering focus on protecting the value of our clients’ investments, making active use of a wide range of techniques to do so when risk of loss threatens.
Dynamic ‘core’ plus derivative ‘alpha’ exposures
Portfolios comprise a dominant ‘core’ of actively managed global fixed income securities, complemented by a carefully selected group of derivative trade ideas.
We dynamically allocate without unnecessary constraint across global fixed interest markets, constantly evaluating and adjusting our allocation in response to the changing environment and opportunity set. Then we overlay derivative alpha strategies to enhance returns, often using futures, options, swaps and credit default swaps.
Risk and liquidity management
Constant monitoring and active mitigation of the primary risks present in client portfolios – the sensitivity to a change in headline interest rates, the threat of default, and market and portfolio liquidity – is integral to ensuring we maintain a prudent balance between overall portfolio risk and return.
Capital preservation and liquidity remain constants in our thinking, pervasive in all decision-making. For every dollar that our clients entrust to us to manage a pivotal decision we constantly re-evaluate is how much of that dollar we are comfortable to invest at any given point, and at what risk.
Once we are comfortable with that high-level determination the unconstrained nature of our strategy allows us to seek out the best investments wherever in the world they are.
Investing even in a diverse portfolio of predominantly investment-grade bonds – the active ‘core’ of the portfolio – is not without risk, the most significant of these being their sensitivity to a change in interest rates (duration), and the chance of failure to pay investors their due interest (credit default).
We constantly monitor and adjust the portfolio’s exposure to these and other risks, typically using derivatives to do so given their greater liquidity, and the ability to ‘fine-tune’ more closely than is possible by buying and selling the bonds in the portfolio.
We also use derivative instruments to add a small amount of additional return through a series of ‘relative value’ alpha trades, when we have specific conviction.
