About Newton

Newton Investment Management is a London-based, global investment management subsidiary of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation. With assets under management of over £47bn (as of 30 June 2011), Newton provides a broad range of award-winning investment products and services to a wide range of clients, including pension funds, charities, corporations and individuals.

Our global, thematic approach to investment has been highly regarded for over 30 years and has proved to be invaluable in overcoming the short-term uncertainties that afflict financial markets and challenge investors. As well as our goal of delivering strong risk-adjusted returns, our approach has involved a transparency that is essential in the building of longstanding relationships with our clients around the world.

The key benefit of our global, thematic approach is that it allows us to gain long-term perspective on global financial markets and economies. There is no shortage of information in the modern world, but information without perspective lacks resonance. Perspective is a defining feature of our investment process; it helps us to anticipate how the world will change and it identifies areas of risk and opportunity across the globe.

A central tenet of our approach, which dates back to the inception of the firm, is that 'change leads to opportunity'. The world is changing constantly and it follows that, to be fruitful, an investment approach must be dynamic enough to take advantage of such change.

Our key to preserving perspective is our structure. Newton employs highly-qualified career analysts, many of whom have direct experience in the global sectors for which they are responsible. Teams of investment managers are organised by mandate type. Our analysts and investment managers sit in one location, London, rather than being spread around the world, and this collaborative arrangement promotes perspective on the investment landscape, strong idea generation and the swift implementation of investment ideas.

Newton is highly committed to the UK institutional market with institutional assets under management in excess of $16.4bn (as of 30 June 2011). We have over 62 UK Segregated institutional clients with assets in excess of £8.7bn and on average each of the clients has been with us for over seven years. We believe that our emphasis on the use of performance fees aligns our approach with the interests of our clients.
Newton has expertise in a number of disciplines and, over the years, those disciplines themselves have evolved. We remain faithful to our longstanding strategies, but we are mindful too of the opportunities that exist in specialist areas of investment and, in recent years, we have developed a number of specialist strategies. Our areas of expertise include:

1. Multi-asset management of equities, bonds and cash;
2. Portfolios with absolute-return objectives;
3. Specialist regional and global equity mandates (both 'benchmark-aware' and unconstrained); and
4. Specialist regional global bond mandates.

Our 'holistic' approach to investing allows us to be fully aware of the risks in portfolios, as well as to compare the relative attractiveness of different investment opportunities in a dispassionate manner that is not always available to the purely-specialist manager.

Pension funds have tended to move away from awarding investment managers multi-asset briefs in favour of establishing 'multi-specialist' mandates, but we remain convinced that a multi-asset approach to investing has great merit. Our perspective and flexibility make us ideally suited to the management of multi-asset strategies, not least at times of uncertainty in financial markets.

In the management of multi-asset strategies, we have developed funds with an unconstrained, 'targeted' (cash-plus) orientation. They invest, without limitations, in 'conventional' asset classes (UK and global equities, bonds and cash) but also use downside protection tools and income-generating derivatives where appropriate to provide strong absolute returns over the long term, but with considerably less volatility than is experienced in equity markets. In employing real-return strategies, the constraint of a relative benchmark is removed and we take a more opportunistic approach to achieving the performance target than is the case with 'traditional' multi-asset strategies.

The perspective and idea generation implicit in our approach is highly beneficial to the management of both specialist funds and multi-asset funds. Our thematic perspective identifies 'winning' companies, and we manage a wide range of UK, global and regional equity funds whose strong performance records have been achieved as a result of both that perspective and our fundamental research.

In addition to 'benchmark-aware' equity portfolios, Newton manages 'unconstrained' UK and global equity strategies which are constructed irrespective of index (benchmark composition) with the intention of generating strong absolute returns.

We employ our global, thematic approach to bond investment in the same way as to equity investment, with each position in our portfolios being thematically driven. This approach is different from that adopted by many investors (who view bonds and currencies merely as a function of economics).

Our thematic approach to investing helps us to obtain perspective on bond markets and to focus on important trends, rather than on the short-term price variations that occur in markets. In addition to Newton's global fixed-income funds, we offer a number of innovative strategies that invest wherever attractive opportunities arise in bond markets.