Investment Grade Income Team

Scott Smith: Our team specializes in income and total return solutions for a broad spectrum of clients, everywhere from buy and maintain insurance clients all the way through the spectrum to total return corporate and pension mandates. Our team has a long history of expertise in managing investment grade credit portfolios, but also expertise in managing across the spectrum within the structured products space. The most dependable way to drive consistent long term alpha is through security selection. For us, security selection is comprehensive, bottom up credit research complemented by a thorough relative value framework. So essentially making sure that we are extracting that risk efficiently from the market. So within this, I think there are a couple of differentiators worth pointing out. The first is just that we manage portfolios with a balance of both income and total return. In fact, we would say that well underwritten or well-researched income, if done well, will in and of itself lead to competitive total return. While we are benchmark-aware, we are not benchmark-centric. And for us, really being liberated from the benchmark allows us to focus on where we see value in the market, not just where the largest positions live within the benchmark. I think related to this is that it really allows us to look at a much broader opportunity set for our high conviction security selection ideas. We think that it is extremely important to be functionally organized to extract value from the market. So for us, what that means is that our senior portfolio managers are also the ones trading the portfolio and executing within the market. They are the ones that are at the crossroads of all information. We are the individuals that are working most closely on a daily basis with the credit analyst. We are also the ones that are putting together the bookends of our strategy conclusions on a monthly basis. As a team, we are organized to be responsive and partner with our clients. We simply want to be an extension of our clients' teams. At Allspring, the client is truly the center of everything that we do.