March 16, 2020—Amid a turbulent global and market environment, we remain committed to our clients and colleagues.
Governments & Insurance
We build customized portfolios focused on maximizing results for each valuable unit of risk and capital.
We bring deep experience to serving the unique investment needs of complex asset and liability-sensitive pools including insurance firms, government entities, and other complex trusts and investment portfolios. In doing so, we focus on maximizing results for each valuable unit of risk and capital. We think holistically, balancing the interaction of risk-hedging reserves and growth-oriented, surplus portfolios to optimal effect, and leveraging our firm’s full resources to the client’s best advantage.
Each client team is led by a senior investor and backed by expert investment professionals. Together, this team partners with each client to help refine strategic priorities and understand their trade-offs. This process helps us to ensure that every investment decision is informed by the portfolio’s unique requirements, and reflects what we believe will most effectively achieve its goals.
To deliver the best ideas, we have built a global firm with experienced investors focused on sourcing and evaluating opportunities worldwide — including a full range of alternative assets, such as private equity, private debt, hedge funds, and real assets. This breadth of experience and resources allows us to construct truly differentiated portfolios designed to help our clients reach their targets while reducing downside risk.
We also leverage our market presence and scale to negotiate favorable terms and fees with managers. To align ourselves with our clients’ interests, we do not offer proprietary, off-the-shelf investment products or accept payments to recommend managers’ products. We don’t have other business agendas that compete with our clients for our best ideas or for our focus on their best interests.
We serve a diverse group of institutional portfolios with complex asset and liability pools
- Insurance firms
- Governments and sovereign wealth funds
- Pension plans
- Settlement, NDT, and other specialized trusts
Our Latest Insights
The “secret sauce” to long-term investment success is, in most cases, the governance that guides and oversees the investment program. In this series, we discuss the roles and responsibilities of governance; highlight the steps to build a diverse and collaborative committee, and outline the culture of a well-functioning committee.
Investors are now grappling with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has sent global equities into bear market territory as the threat of a severe recession weighs on the global economy. These are challenging, uncertain times for equity markets. As investors work to ensure their portfolios will be robust through this downturn and are positioned for the eventual rebound, we offer a review of the critical benefits of global equity diversification and examine considerations related to home bias, rebalancing strategies, and currency impacts.
Nominal high-quality sovereign bond yields throughout developed markets have plummeted toward zero, increasing the likelihood that most developed markets may soon need to contend with negative yields, and leading investors to question whether high-quality sovereign bonds are still the best form of insurance. In light of these developments, we examine the historical safe-haven characteristics of high-quality sovereign bonds and assesses whether they remain a viable safe-haven asset.
In periods of market stress, it can be difficult to rebalance, much less overweight risky assets like equities. In this paper, we review our approach using multiple lenses: magnitude and duration of drawdowns relative to history, cheapness of valuations, and presence of pre-conditions for markets to begin their ascent. Such an approach can help investors tune out the emotion and dial in on the hard data and most probable outcomes even in the face of great uncertainty. While opportunities are developing across many markets, investors should hold off on broad overweights to risky assets at this time.
For non-profit institutions, the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 virus, and the speed by which these disruptions have materialized, create a perfect financial storm.
March 23, 2020— As we write in March 2020, COVID-19 is spreading across much of the world, undercutting economic activity. While how this situation will unfold is not entirely clear, we have long believed that the best way to guard against future uncertainty is to have a well-constructed portfolio. One key component in that is understanding the relationship between asset prices and inflation.
