Asset classes

Our approach

Our Global Markets Alpha (GMA) strategy taps into our specialist teams’ expertise to extract investment ideas and organise them within a nimble risk-budgeting framework. The result brings together strong risk controls with “freedom to perform”.

We believe that the key to maximising returns, especially during periods of volatility, lies in being able to invest efficiently across fixed income asset classes in a flexible and risk-controlled fashion. Our GMA strategy is designed to do just this. It is not, however, a fund of funds or manager of managers approach.

Instead, we ask each investment team to supply investment ideas that will produce a desired level of risk and return. To decide how much risk to assign to each alpha team, we use a forward-looking assessment of economic and market conditions to estimate the extent of the investment opportunities available to each alpha pod. We call this a “risk budget”.

The investment ideas supplied by our alpha pods are turned into sized trades. The resulting portfolio is monitored and hedges may be applied to remove excessive directionality at the overall portfolio level.