We wanted to take some time to cover some of the recent themes and questions that were brought up in our most recent webinar in this week’s post and share them with our audience.
The topic of this webinar panel discussion was timely, with the current interest rate environment in different European countries and the possible impact on different investment strategies.
For this May 2016 panel discussion we were joined by Marc Profitlich, Portfolio Manager and co-founder at ProfitlichSchmidlin, a 150 million EUR AuM investment management company based in Germany that was founded in 2013. Marc and his team have an investment strategy that focuses on value investing in equities and fixed income special situations investing. I, Johannes Hauptmann, also joined in this session to provide my industry perspective and the perspective of Anevis Solutions, as a provider of fund fact sheet design and automation for over 50 financial institutions around the world.
The topic for the day focused on the different performance metrics being utilized by various investment managers to represent their investment strategies and the shortcomings and issues their investment teams face in their practical application.
It was very insightful to hear the perspective of Marc and the complexities in how they successfully represent their specialized investment strategy, especially in the current market environment. We looked at some of the indicators and metrics commonly used in managing fixed income or multi-asset portfolio investments, as well as some of the real issues and shortcomings faced in their usage.
The first major topic touched upon was on the average time to maturity, and the impact on callable securities & the redemption characteristics in different market environments. This was an area especially important to fixed income portfolio managers as they are looking at the callability features of different fixed income investments. This is an issue that is especially important when we see an interest rate environment that offers incentives to call these securities and issue at new, lower interest rates.
Next, we looked at the rating class considerations and their relevance in the portfolio. This was one particularly interesting area when we see that the different rating classes may offer attractive investment opportunities for some portfolio managers who are not restricted to investment grade assets as part of their portfolio mandate. Our presenter, Marc, walked through some of the nuances that can help improve your investment strategy.
Lastly, we looked at the Individual classifications of different securities. This is an area that may lack transparency and an appropriate level of granularity. When this happens investors do not have a deep level of insight into the underlying investment holdings of a particular investment strategy leading to wrong expectations on investment returns.
We fielded some interesting questions related to his investment strategy in the current market environment. We also got some interesting questions from our audience that were related to capabilities of investment managers in reporting these different metrics in a concise and automated manner. If you or your investment team are looking for more information on how anevis solutions provides factsheet design and reporting for your investment strategies, please feel free to send me an email at johannes.hauptmann@anevis-solutions.com and if you are looking to view our webinar on-demand, you can access it by filling out the form.
