Core Fixed Income Team

Maulik Bhansali: We believe what distinguishes us and our team is the process we have, as well as the outcome of that process. For us, our process is really defined by an almost exclusive focus on security collection. Over our history, over 90% of our performance comes from security selection. We really seek to minimize all the other risks in the portfolio so that clients don't have any surprises. And the reason we do this is because we believe that security selection is what leads to consistent and replicable performance over time with no surprises. In fact, we've outperformed our benchmark 31 out of 32 years because of this process. One of the hallmarks of what we seek to deliver for clients is not just superior returns, but superior risk-adjusted returns as measured by information ratio. And what that really means is taking risk for clients when we're getting paid to take that risk. We've seen shifts in volatility regimes over and over again over the past 20 years. And really one of the hardest things to do and one of the things that we really seek to do is have discipline on when we're taking risks for our clients. One of the critical components of focusing on information ratio is really having the discipline to not reach when markets aren't offering relative value. And we've seen the benefit of having that approach time and time again over the past 20, 30 years. You really need to have that discipline and really focus on risk-adjusted returns in order to be able to take advantage when volatility comes and you have a greater opportunity set. We're looking for security level mispricings. We're looking for dislocations. We're looking for things that we believe are undervalued or overvalued. And we're looking to take advantage of those opportunities over and over again. Taking risk when clients are getting paid to take risk is really what information ratio is all about. Information ratio is about higher excess returns when the opportunity set is greater and lower excess returns when it's not. And we've seen over the past 20 years, whether it was through the financial crisis or through COVID and its aftermath, that that approach and having the discipline to really focus on the right risks at the right time can really pay off for clients.