Blogs

24 Jun 2021 How OKRs Helped Us Navigate Growing Pains and Boost Investment Focus for Our Clients

by Guillaume Detrait, President & Chief Risk Officer [email protected] During my 13-year tenure at Welton, I’ve overseen periods of growth, change, and the 2020 Covid pandemic crisis. And while each of these periods brought its own unique challenges, one organizational framework has recently helped us weather them all. That framework is known as Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs for short. I want to share our continuing experience to benefit those less familiar and to stimulate discussion with experienced OKR managers to advance learning for us all. Management By Objective (MBO) – Where we began Beginning in 2010, we formalized...

08 Jun 2021 Towards the Development of an ESG Scoring Framework for Derivatives

As the appetite for sustainable investing grows, investors are increasingly seeking investment options that go beyond the commonly available long-only equity ESG funds. Welton has written elsewhere, (“Solving the ESG Dilemma: How to Advance One’s Values While Also Improving Performance”), about how building in multi-asset class strategies into an ESG framework can improve performance. But if we truly want to allocate our investment dollars in ways that solve some of our greatest environmental and social challenges and that gain wider adoption by the investment marketplace, we need to develop multi-asset ESG products that can help us build more sophisticated ESG...

12 Mar 2021 The Unprecedented $1.9T Stimulus Package and What It Might Mean for Investors in the Weeks and Months Ahead

For macroeconomic investors the passage of this bill is a watershed event, but its implications for what comes next are likely even more consequential. The new $1.9T economic relief package that was passed by Congress this week and signed into law yesterday, is without question the most ambitious anti-poverty agenda in a generation. Economists estimate that low- and moderate-income Americans will benefit the most from this aid, especially individuals earning $75,000 or less and couples earning $150,000 or less. The number of Americans living in poverty is predicted to drop in 2021 by as much as a third because of...

18 Nov 2020 Does the DOL have it wrong? How Pensions Can Satisfy Their Fiduciary Duty And Still Invest Responsibly

Can you be a responsible investor and still live up to your duties as a fiduciary? Recent regulatory developments from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) would lead one to believe investors have to make a choice and if that choice involves non-pecuniary vehicles then such investments would be prohibited. The recent guidance gives financial risk and returns primacy over any other factors, such as ESG investing, and went so far as to recommend barring ESG considerations from investment decisions by pension funds. I believe the DOL has this wrong. Responsible investing strategies don’t need to come at a cost....