Woodbury draws on multiple external investment strategy and manager research providers to provide expert input into stages of our Portfolio-by-Design process. In this way, we are accessing the same information as larger private bank or broking firms, but with a more diverse spread of views and outlooks.
Strategy research is of two types: Long-term (Strategic); and Shorter-term (Dynamic or Tactical). We retain leading independent global market and economic research firms for objective views on fundamentals and investment strategy, while utilising inputs from the long term capital market forecasting & research teams of some of the largest economic and investment management firms in the world to generate long term assumptions for Strategic Asset Allocation modelling. That is, we have access to the same strategy material that the large private banks and brokers do … it’s just that we don’t carry the huge overhead to generate different insights. We focus on what to actually do with the outputs based on our team’s experience working in similar large investment organisations.
Utilising multiple expert inputs provides us with more than just a single house view (as is the case with brokers and investment banks). Some firms are better than others in particular areas and likewise some are more bearish and others more bullish in their views. By selecting multiple providers, based on their different views of the world, we can address the question “What is it we might be missing?”. This provides us with a more robust assumption set for designing client portfolios. In this way, we can avoid ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ of a centralised house view that is pushed down to brokers and investment bank advisers via strategies tilted to selling in-house investment products.
For manager or product research, we use leading external manager research providers to help generate a priority list of managers and strategies we can use for client portfolios. We employ a minimum standard rating from one or more of these research houses, which acts as an initial screen. From there, we generate a short-list of managers and strategies grouped by role and specialisation, from which we draw for solutions. For private market strategies, we employ a separate research process incorporating screening data from external private market research providers as part of our initial due diligence.
All managers, products and strategies used in client portfolios must first be placed on our priority list (where approval to be placed on the list can only be granted by our internal Investment Committee).