We seek to provide excess returns for total return accounts and excess yield targets for buy-and-maintain strategies, by investing in a high-quality asset class with duration and commensurate yield.
Our investment believe income is the most significant and predictable component of total return over time, while price change is highly volatile and less significant. Income is the core component of both buy-and-maintain as well as total return strategies. A focus on security selection is critical in our bottom-up portfolio management style. There is flexibility to develop customized, client-specific solutions.
Investment approach
- Income driven; risk-controlled approach focused on disciplined, bottom up, fundamental research.
Strategic partnership
- Ability and expertise to customize total return and buy and maintain mandates that are aligned with investors’ objectives.
An experienced, well-resourced team
- Our dedicated, experienced municipal team comprises veteran investment professionals across research, trading and portfolio management.
We strive to preserve capital while maximizing total after-tax return. Our disciplined, bottom-up, research-driven process emphasizes the yield component of total return, minimizing the need to forecast interest rates and economic activity. We maintain a flat organizational structure across portfolio managers, research analysts, and traders.
01 | Portfolio construction
- Guidelines for benchmark / peer group comparison
- Monetary / fiscal policy
- Portfolio strategy
- Bottom-up security section
- Duration management
- Buy / sell discipline
02 | Trading and risk management
- Manage new issue process
- Identify secondary market opportunities that satisfy portfolio strategies
- Familiarity with credit nuances
- Relative value analysis
- Rolldown analysis / yield curve shape
- Execution / risk management compliance
- Monitor pricing / net asset value (NAV) variances
03 | Credit analysis
- Cornerstone of bottom-up-process
- Proprietary, independent research
- Focus on key financial and credit metrics
- Assign internal rating
- Active surveillance structure
- Monitor trading comparatives
04 | Tax management
- Loss harvesting
- Controlled turnover
- State taxes
- De minimis
- Coordination among several managers
05 | Portfolio surveillance and reporting
- Daily performance monitoring versus benchmark / peers
- Portfolio adjustments
- Periodic client reporting and meetings
- Board reporting
For more information about our Credit capabilities
Risks
The value of the portfolio may fall as well as rise, and you may not receive back the amount invested.
Fixed income securities can lose value, and investors can lose principal, as interest rates rise. They also may be affected by economic conditions that hinder an issuer's ability to make interest and principal payments on its debt. This includes prepayment risk, the risk that the principal of a fixed income security that is held by the portfolio may be prepaid prior to maturity, potentially forcing the portfolio to reinvest that money at a lower interest rate.
Securities in the lowest of the rating categories considered to be investment grade (that is, Baa or BBB) have some speculative characteristics.
Liquidity risk is the possibility that securities cannot be readily sold within seven days at approximately the price at which a fund has valued them.
IBOR risk is the risk that changes related to the use of the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) or similar rates (such as EONIA) could have adverse impacts on financial instruments that reference these rates. The abandonment of these rates and transition to alternative rates could affect the value and liquidity of instruments that reference them and could affect investment strategy performance.
Natural or environmental disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other severe weather-related phenomena generally, and widespread disease, including pandemics and epidemics, have been and can be highly disruptive to economies and markets, adversely impacting individual companies, sectors, industries, markets, currencies, interest and inflation rates, credit ratings, investor sentiment, and other factors affecting the value of the Strategy’s investments. Given the increasing interdependence among global economies and markets, conditions in one country, market, or region are increasingly likely to adversely affect markets, issuers, and/or foreign exchange rates in other countries. These disruptions could prevent the Strategy from executing advantageous investment decisions in a timely manner and could negatively impact the Strategy’s ability to achieve its investment objective. Any such event(s) could have a significant adverse impact on the value and risk profile of the Strategy.
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