General
The firm’s highly disciplined, quantitative investment approach is characterized by a distinctive blend of fundamental bottom-up stock selection, top-down macro research, and technical evaluation.
Our active approach to investment management leverages decades of academic research supporting the benefits of utilizing style factors in the investment process. Style factors are security characteristics, such as a stock’s price to sales ratio or return on equity, that help explain the difference in returns across assets. The systematic application of quantitative techniques is central to the firm’s investment approach.
Asset Allocation Approach
Asset allocation is the process of dividing your investments among different asset classes, such as stocks, bonds, and cash. It is one of the most important decisions you will make as an investor, as it can have a significant impact on your long-term returns.
We work with you to create an asset allocation that is right for you. We educate you so that you understand what you are invested in and why. Our goal is to give you the confidence and comfort to make sound investment decisions, even in volatile markets. This will help you avoid costly mistakes that could derail you from achieving your financial goals.
Focus on Risk Management
The primary goal of Financial Trust’s asset allocation models is to help clients manage the risk and return profile of their portfolio. Risk management is at the forefront of this process because it is an important part of preventing emotionally driven decisions that can arise in volatile markets.
Core and Explore
The foundation of our asset allocation models is a core and explore approach that blends proprietary passive, smart beta, and active investment strategies. The core is comprised of passive and smart beta strategies that aim to provide exposure to the market with low tracking error. The explore portion provides opportunity to earn alpha via active investment management in potentially less efficient areas of the market.
Combine Strategic and Tactical Asset Allocation
This approach incorporates traditional diversification by investing in asset classes that are not perfectly correlated, while aiming to build on it, by adding tactical asset allocation to the mix. The main objective of tactical asset allocation is to add an additional layer of risk management, particularly during times of turmoil where correlations have tended towards one, thus making traditional diversification less effective
Tactical Toolbox™
Tactical allocation is implemented with Financial Trust’s Tactical Toolbox™ series of investment strategies. The Tactical Toolbox™ is a family of strategies that systematically adjusts equity market exposure in multiple asset classes. Each strategy in the series generates a signal based on market conditions in a particular market segment. The Tactical Toolbox™ strategies cover different geographic regions and market capitalization segments. By combining with a traditional diversified portfolio, this process effectively creates a tactical range around your long-term strategic allocation for each asset class.