Investment Managers - Franklin Templeton Fixed Income

With more than 30 years of experience, Franklin Templeton's Fixed Income group seeks diversified sources of alpha from around the globe. The team brings expertise in a variety of sectors, including investment grade corporates, mortgage-backed securities, non-dollar bonds, emerging market debt, high yield, and bank loans. Each sector is covered by a dedicated team, enabling us to search the market and uncover unique opportunities. Teams work in cooperation with a group of tenured portfolio managers under the oversight of the Fixed Income Policy Committee. This interactive portfolio-building process, enhanced by our integrated research across fixed income and equity platforms, provides thorough company and sector coverage from multiple viewpoints and most importantly, a global perspective. The group utilizes research capabilities from offices located around the world, including local asset management offices in Brazil, China, Vietnam, India, Middle East and North Africa.

The Franklin Templeton Fixed Income Group Advantage

• Experience and History - We have historically been pioneers in the fixed income marketplace, introducing products in high yield, bank loans, and emerging markets. Today, our research platform includes specialist teams covering every sector in markets around the globe.
• Global Resources and Expertise - Our top-down macro views and bottom-up fundamental analysis enable us to find opportunities from around the world. Our quantitative team works alongside portfolio managers to ensure appropriate risk management in a consistent, systematic fashion. Our teams have access to business leaders, central banks, and government officials, which has afforded us influence with regard to pricing and the structuring new issuance across the capital markets.
• Strong Track Record - Our long-term disciplined approach to investing—one that focuses on finding securities that have the potential for returns greater than the true risks involved—has resulted in a distinguished performance history across several market cycles.

Investment Philosophy

We believe a portfolio built around a diversified set of low-correlated positions has the potential to generate the most attractive risk-adjusted returns over a full market cycle. By implementing a large number of small, low-correlated active positions, the risk of poor portfolio performance from any single position is reduced. Our global framework, significant bottom-up resources, and integrated quantitative group allow us to maximize the number of these positions, and identify market inefficiencies that we seek to exploit in a disciplined manner that incorporates our risk-management techniques. In our view, this process is essential to our goal of achieving consistent outperformance across all strategies.

Investment Process

Whether managing single- or multi-sector strategies, the team utilizes a collaborative approach to identify securities that we believe offer the most attractive potential risk-adjusted returns over time. Three fundamental pillars drive our investment process: the firm's Fixed Income Policy Committee meets weekly and helps to set top-down policy; our fundamental, bottom-up style permeates all of our investment disciplines from a security selection perspective; and our quant team helps drive our strategy-specific allocation process, which is focused around bringing the first two research pillars to bear at a portfolio level. This approach allows us to combine bottom-up security selection with top-down portfolio allocations, seeking to capitalize on global economic trends. Risk management plays an integral role in the investment process as well, with a dedicated team of quantitative analysts tasked with building proprietary risk models.

*The Franklin Templeton Fixed Income Group combines the expertise of the Franklin Advisors, Inc., and Fiduciary Trust Company International fixed income teams (established 1971 and 1973, respectively).