CREDIT

Discipline

MacKay Shields is a value-oriented, opportunistic fixed income manager with a special expertise in credit.  The US Investment Grade Credit philosophy is centered on our pursuit of consistent, superior rates of return with low volatility.  Our goal for our product is to provide enhanced returns over a full market cycle with lower-than-market risk.  As “Northwest Quadrant” investors, we are high risk-adjusted return managers who search for undervalued securities within the bond markets.  We seek to capitalize on inefficiencies in the bond markets using our substantial experience and product expertise while emphasizing promising sectors identified by our sector-focused research.  Our investment process combines a top-down assessment of the climate for risk and the outlook for the economy, while security selection represents the bottom-up element of our investment process.

In the case of credit, the bottom-up process for issuer selection involves an analysis of the following:

We also evaluate the technical conditions in the market, including current sentiment and liquidity, to better assess any mispricing of risk.