As a provider of asset management services, Avellemy understands its obligations to clients who have entrusted us with their capital, but also understands its responsibilities to the wider community through the impact of its asset management activities.
Stewardship is the responsible allocation, management, and oversight of capital to create long term value for clients and beneficiaries, leading to sustainable benefits for the economy, the environment and society. This includes setting expectations, oversight of assets, engaging with issuers, voting and so forth. We believe good stewardship means being aware and active on rights issues, corporate actions and other responsibilities tied to fund, share or bond holdings, and fundamentally underpins our investment philosophy.
Our investment philosophy and process
What we believe in
Avellemy believes investment - as opposed to speculation - is at its simplest level a claim on a cash flow. Prudent asset management utilises the varying cash-flow characteristics of equity, debt, property and commodities to increase the purchasing power of our clients' capital. Additionally, Avellemy performs this activity with due respect paid to our clients' declared risk tolerance.
Primarily, Avellemy's portfolio construction process is focussed on achieving superior risk-adjusted returns over the medium to long-term, through judicious strategic asset allocation. The constituents may be both collective investments and individual securities, in any event subjected to a stringent due diligence and selection process. At securities level, the key characteristics we seek are high quality companies with strong management and wide 'economic moats' in industries and service sectors that have relatively high barriers to entry. We select businesses we admire and want to own, irrespective of the vagaries of their share price behaviour. Their contribution to our "claim on a cash-flow" approach can be delivered through increasing earnings, growing dividend payments, or interest on their debt obligations. We expect returns on property to reflect robust rental yields backed by high rates of occupancy.
The collective investments we identify as a 'proxy' for particular asset classes, economies and market sectors must pass a variety of stringent quantitative tests, and their managers must demonstrate a robust and repeatable process that is followed diligently.
How we select investments
We believe that varying asset allocation across equities, bonds, property, and commodities explains a significant majority of relative risk-adjusted portfolio performance. Consequently, Avellemy obtains economic data and analysis from specialist external parties in order to inform its decision-making process and thus produce a range of risk-targeted portfolios.
In tandem, Avellemy's investment research team performs detailed quantitative analysis of businesses and fund managers to determine a short-list of potential portfolio constituents. This is followed by meetings with those managers to better understand their objectives, process, and the resources at their disposal. We are keenly aware of potential behavioural biases and seek to mitigate these through our due diligence process.
The managers on our buy list of constituents and potential substitutes are constantly monitored using third party software, while bi-weekly and monthly meetings allow the investment team to discuss and assess portfolio constituents' fitness for purpose. There is an audit trail for all decisions and ongoing reviews, while manager meetings are frequent, followed by detailed information update that is maintained on file.
Voting
Our primary responsibilities reflect our aim to at all times to "do the right thing" - not only within the confines of regulatory imperatives, but to always act in our clients' best interests while also considering those of the wider community.
For voting on discretionary portfolios, Avellemy utilises a global clearing and custody provider and their robust voting team and infrastructure, to vote on behalf of our clients. We monitor their voting activities to ensure adherence with the Stewardship Code. Where funds are concerned voting decisions are made by the relevant managers in accordance with their own voting policies and process; we nevertheless monitor those managers' approaches to stewardship and engagement.