Friends Fiduciary Corporation engages the
services of professional investment managers, while final
responsibility for investment management lies with FFC’s
Board of Directors. FFC’s Investment Committee, and in
particular the investment professionals who make up the
Small Investment Committee, oversee asset allocation, payout
ratio, performance, and benchmarks. The managers must follow
FFC's socially responsible investment policy investing
in ways that are consistent with Testimonies & Concerns
of the Religious Society of Friends.
Current
Investment Manager
Chicago
Equity Partners
Best described as
a Growth at a Reasonable Price manager, Chicago
Equity Partners uses a quantitative approach that combines growth and value
characteristics in stock selection. Their sector and
industry weightings closely match the S&P 500.
Benchmark:
S&P 500
Brandywine
Global Investment
Brandywine takes a relative value
approach to large cap domestic equities. While
sector weightings are pegged to those of the Russell 1000,
stock selection is based on traditional measures of value. Benchmark: Russell 1000.
Great
Lakes Advisors
Great Lakes buys low valuation (low P/E) stocks of established
companies. Portfolios are neither concentrated nor indexed to the
market, but diversified across industries whose cumulative
market capitalization is at least half the S&P 500.
Benchmark: Russell 1000 Value
U.S.
Trust Diversified Value
U.S.
Trust's Diversified Value managers take a contrarian
approach, seeking good-quality companies with low valuations
and the potential for fundamental improvement. A
number of holdings are at the smaller end of the large-cap
range. Benchmark: Russell 1000 Value
Radnor
Small Cap (As of June 2005)
Radnor
looks at companies with a market capitalization between $500
million and $1.5 billion. They select stocks for a mix
of value and growth characteristics. Benchmark: Russell
2000
Boston
Common (As of March 2006)
Boston Common
does global social investing. The firm goes beyond screening
and managing international portfolios. Their in-house social
research supports an active program of corporate dialogue
and shareholder advocacy.
Urdang
Securities Management
Focused exclusively on real estate,
Urdang recognizes real estate securities as a hybrid
financial investments that must be evaluated on a number of
factors, including the value of the firm's property portfolio
and the quality of
its management team. Benchmark:
Dow Jones Wilshire Real Estate Securities Index
Schroder Investment Management
Schroder Investment Management follows a low-risk, value strategy, researching
individual bonds to take advantage of pricing inefficiencies
in the bond market. Benchmark: Lehman Aggregate Bond
Index
Asset
Allocation
|
Manager
|
Asset
|
Investment
Style
|
Asset
Allocation Model
|
|
Chicago Equity
Partners
|
stocks
|
Growth at a
Reasonable Price
|
24%
|
|
Brandywine Global
|
stocks
|
Relative Value
|
13%
|
|
Great
Lakes Advisors
|
stocks
|
Value
|
8.5%
|
|
US Trust
|
stocks
|
Value
|
8.5%
|
| Radnor Small Cap |
stocks |
Small Cap Core |
2.5% |
| Boston Common |
Stocks |
International |
5% |
|
Urdang
|
REIT's
|
Diversified REIT
Manager
|
5%
|
|
Schroder Investment Mgmt
|
bonds
|
Individual bond
selection
|
33%
|
Due
to changing market conditions and/or valuations, as well as
routine operating cycles of the Consolidated Fund, the
actual asset allocation level may vary slightly from the
long-term asset allocation.
Benchmarks
Benchmarks
are used for performance comparison.
Friends Fiduciary uses several indexes as benchmarks,
allowing us to track how the individual investment managers
and the Fund as a whole are performing.
The performance of the fund relative to these
measures is monitored over short and long periods of time,
with the long-term results providing a more relevant
measure. While
appropriate performance is a necessary component of
investing, the Consolidated Fund has other important
objectives, such as managing risk, avoiding extreme
volatility, generating stable-to-rising income and meeting
social responsibility guidelines. The description of the benchmarks Friends Fiduciary
currently uses may help put them in perspective. It is important to remember, however, that benchmarks
are static and no one benchmark exactly matches the
investment philosophy of any given manager or fund.
S&P
500
The
Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is a
capitalization-weighted index of 500 stocks.
Dating from the early 1940’s, the index is designed
to measure performance of the broad domestic economy through
changes in the aggregate market value of 500 stocks
representing all major industries.
Russell
1000 Value
The
Russell 1000 Value Index, dating from 1992, measures the
performance of those Russell 1000 securities with lower
price-to-book ratios and lower forecasted growth values. The Russell system does not categorize stocks as
strictly growth or value; about one-third- of stocks appear
in both the growth and value indexes.
Russell
2000
The Russell
2000 includes the smallest 2000 securities in the Russell
3000.
Dow Jones Wilshire Real
Estate Securities Index
Wilshire
Associates introduced the Dow Jones Wilshire Real Estate
Securities Index in 1991. The index measures the
performance of publicly traded real estate securities.
Lehman
Aggregate Bond Index
The
Lehman Aggregate Bond Index represents the entire bond universe and
contains securities from the Lehman Government/Corporate
Index and the Lehman Mortgage-Backed Securities Index.
Dating from 1976, it measures the total return of all
major sectors of the domestic, taxable bond market.