Philosophy

At Columbus Macro our philosophy is:

• top-down (focus on region, country, sector, industry, style)
• bottom-up (focus on company fundamental analysis)
• global (exposure to U.S., international developed, and emerging assets)
  

Top-down 

Our analysis starts at the highest levels of the investment hierarchy – seeking to evaluate the impact of dynamic changes in economic growth, inflation, and policy across all asset classes. We employ a weight-of-the-evidence approach that utilizes both third-party data sources as well as our own proprietary models and human analysis.  Macro factors heavily influence the business cycle, financial conditions, and risk appetite.  Sensitivity to macro factors creates opportunities or headwinds at the region, country, sector, industry, or style level that can persist for months or even years. Therefore, macro investment views help to inform both our asset allocation decisions and individual stock selections.   

Bottom-up

But seeking to stay in alignment with key macro trends is only one-half of our approach. We have also constructed rigorous tools for evaluating individual companies based on a wide variety of valuation, profitability, and earnings quality measures.  This fundamental analysis includes an emphasis on assessing a firm’s balance sheet and free cash flow strength as well as industry-specific metrics and potential red-flags.  We believe that robust stock selection techniques, combined with overweight/underweight sector or industry decisions based on macro factors, enhances the opportunity for alpha generation and dividend sustainability.  

Global 

Global diversification has historically lowered the volatility of portfolio returns and provided investors with access to the bulk of the world’s current and future economic growth.  Therefore, our asset allocation strategies seek to provide exposure to U.S., international developed, and emerging assets with active tilts to areas of greatest perceived macro opportunity. 

Finally, the emergence of exchange trade fund (ETFs) over the past decade has greatly reduced the operational challenges and costs associated with gaining targeted global exposure.  With the proliferation of broker/dealers waiving ETF transaction fees, in many cases the trading costs associated with actively-managed strategies has also been reduced.  Our ETF screening process prioritizes instruments based on liquidity and cost. We are provider-agnostic and do not use proprietary investment vehicles or cross-sell other financial products.