Insights

24 Jun 2021

Posted at 20:30h in Blogs

by Guillaume Detrait, President & Chief Risk Officer gdetrait@welton.com 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 our managerial process around...

08 Jun 2021

Posted at 19:16h in Blogs

[caption id="attachment_49684" align="alignleft" width="150"] Dr. Francois Chevallier, PhD, Portfolio Manager, Machine Learning Strategies fchevallier@welton.com[/caption] 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...

12 Mar 2021

Posted at 16:46h in Blogs

[caption id="attachment_95" align="alignleft" width="150"] Dr. Patrick Welton Founder and Chief Investment Officer[/caption] 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...

20 Jan 2021

Posted at 10:00h in Whitepapers

How quickly the world can change! 2020 serves as a reminder of the dramatic market swings that are possible over short calendar year periods. The year began with the markets collapsing as the scale of the global COVID-19 pandemic took shape. This was followed by massive global economic stimulus and eventual vaccine optimism, producing a sizeable market rally by year's end. We examine the underlying macroeconomics at play during the year and the likely implications for the markets going forward. Among them, we note that potential volatility due to continued global capital flows may have implications for investors. We close with a discussion...

18 Nov 2020

Posted at 16:25h in Blogs

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. We...

22 Apr 2020

Posted at 09:25h in Whitepapers

Global Macro practitioners can be divided into two camps: discretionary and systematic. Discretionary practitioners develop a top-down macroeconomic view and engage in concentrated positions based on discretionary assessments of fundamental data such as GDP, exchange rates, inflation, debt levels, and supply-demand dynamics....

19 Sep 2019

Posted at 12:49h in Whitepapers

Investors have asked us this question given the lackluster, and frankly disappointing, performance of many of their Trend managers prior to 2019. Industry observers have opined on this as well, and they sometimes attribute disappointing performance to things like: too much capital in the strategy, lower levels of overall market volatility, the effects of quantitative easing, and myriad other reasons. We decided to conduct some research and draw our own conclusions. Here's what we found...