Friends Fiduciary Corporation

Consolidated Fund
Investment Managers
 
 
Home
About FFC
Services
Quarterly Newsletters
Glossary
Quaker Links
Contact FFC
 
 
CF General Info
CF Summary of Services
CF Investment Managers
CF Performance Table
CF Investment Mgmt
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.