Multi-Asset Investing

This is where the firm started. Before anything else, we wanted to understand how different markets affect each other.

They rarely move alone. Equities follow economic growth. Bonds follow interest rates and inflation. Commodities react to supply, demand and politics, and currencies reflect the gap between one economy and another. Study each of them separately and you miss most of what connects them. A portfolio can look well spread out on paper and still lose money in one place, because everything in it was reacting to the same thing.

…look for opportunities, to see where a portfolio is exposed, and to understand how positions behave together…

So our research puts equities, fixed income, commodities, currencies, alternatives and the wider economic picture into one framework. We use it to look for opportunities, to see where a portfolio is exposed, and to understand how positions behave together, especially when markets are under stress.

We want every holding to have a reason to be there. Diversification, for us, means knowing how the pieces move together, which is a different thing from owning a lot of them. Risk is sized deliberately, so it never ends up wherever the allocation happens to leave it.

Status: research and systematic strategy testing finished. Of all our areas, this is the furthest along.