Our Investment Process

Different market cycles provide unique investment opportunities to identify undervalued securities for our clients’ portfolios.  Additionally, those cycles demand relative value decision-making, with regards to sector, the yield curve and maturity management.   We will diligently scour the investment grade fixed income universe to identify attractive investments for our clients while maintaining high quality diversified portfolios which is the hallmark of our investment process.  All portfolios are managed on a team basis, with our best strategies implemented in all accounts.  Accounts with the same benchmark are similarly structured.   

Sector Management
We evaluate relative value opportunities among the different fixed income sectors and determine which sector(s) have the greatest long term potential for superior performance.  Our emphasis is then concentrated on selecting the best securities within these sectors.  In general, we will always own shorter maturity corporate, mortgage-backed or asset-backed securities because we believe that these securities are most often mispriced by the markets.  For longer maturity bonds, we assess relative value by closely monitoring the breakeven yield spreads relative to U.S. Treasuries yields in the context of economic conditions and historical yield spreads. 

Our portfolio managers are directly involved in research and trading.  We do our own research and evaluations on individual securities actively monitoring all holdings in our portfolios.  Each security is evaluated always looking for a “margin of safety” under various economic conditions.  While we choose our credits carefully, we also strongly believe in diversifying the credit risk in our portfolios and limit both the percent and duration contribution risk of each credit.