Understand the Market Place
We seek to understand the market place by interrogating our unique multi-asset funds of funds database, conducting face to face fund manager interviews and assigning each fund in the database to one or more of our unique Investment Outcome Categories – Positive Target Return, Rising Income, High Income, Pragmatic Growth, Long Term Growth, Volatility Target Return and Volatility Ceiling. A blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis then helps us to identify managers with the highest quality in each category.
Detailed workbooks are sent to the fund group for it to complete. The fund group’s entries ultimately help us to populate our unique database, which contains 100 fields of descriptive, qualitative and factual data on each fund / proposition – enabling us to search, filter and compare using any chosen characteristic.
Initial 2-hour face to face fund manager interviews enable us to verify the accuracy of the entries in our database and to better understand:
How the investment team operates and how it measures its own success when making asset allocation and investment selection decisions.
The investment approach
The investment scope
How we might expect a fund to perform
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Risk adjusted performance characteristics in individually defined risk on and risk off market conditions, portfolio holdings data, financial market data, other quantitative information, charts and trends are analysed to help us understand whether funds in the database are performing as we would expect given both their Investment Outcome Categories and the findings from our initial fund manager interview. Managers and teams who can demonstrate; a clear information advantage, unique investment processes and whose funds exhibit excellent risk adjusted performance qualities whilst also meeting their objectives are highlighted for further in-depth due diligence.
In preparation for further face to face interviews with fund managers and their teams, we gather detailed factual information about the fund management group’s organisational structure, its markets, business strategy and its products. We want to understand how the group supports its multi-asset funds of funds proposition, how risk is measured and monitored, the extent to which messaging in reporting materials correlates with our understanding of the fund and, how fund expenses are kept in check. We also ask for historic holdings and asset allocation data, which we analyse using our proprietary quants system.
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Further 2-hour face to face fund manager interviews enable us to:
Verify the accuracy of the fund group’s entries in our due diligence questionnaire from the perspective of the fund manager and team.
Question managers and their teams on how performance has been achieved during a series of individually defined historic risk on and risk off market periods.
Gather evidence to verify that the investment philosophy and approach has been consistently applied.
Understand current positioning and strategy.
We construct a due diligence style report, which combines the results of our research with our objective opinion. Our reports cover all of the following key research topics:
Reports cover all of the following key research topics:
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Finally, each calendar quarter, as a by-product of the research process, our multi-asset funds of funds database is updated, new managers may be added and a sub-set of the database subsequently uploaded to Scopic Prism. Scopic Prism is available via a login from the Scopic website and is designed to assist intermediaries with their own due diligence process and to enable fund groups to conduct their own competitor analysis. It contains; descriptive, qualitative and factual data on all the funds in the database, as well as unique fund commentaries.
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