Managers Talk Highlights

Last week, we hosted an exclusive event in New York, featuring three portfolio managers who shared their investment strategies, portfolio highlights, and market outlooks. The session provided a unique opportunity for our clients to engage directly with top-tier firms, gain insights into how they are navigating today’s complex economic environment, and hear firsthand how macroeconomic trends, interest rate expectations, and geopolitical developments are shaping portfolio decisions.

Below, we summarize some of the key insights from the management firms.

• Strategic Diversification: Schoenfeld’s multi-strategy approach includes quant trading, tactical trading, macro fixed income, and equity long & short— each performing in different market conditions.
• Quantitative Edge: The quant unit, comprising 35-40% of their flagship fund, is data- and tech-driven, leveraging real-time market data for global trading.
• Tactical Opportunities: Tactical trading targets episodic and structural events (e.g., index rebalancing), like the recent inclusion of Coinbase in the S&P 500.
• Macro Insights: Macro fixed income plays a dual role—generating returns and informing other strategies amid market-wide events like CPI prints.
• Benefits of Scale and talent retention: Tolkin highlighted Schonfeld’s ability to enjoy better deal terms and proprietary data generation—unmatched by their smaller peers. The firm also has a high retention rate, fostering a collaborative, data-sharing culture.
• Outlook for 2025: Expect continued volatility due to geopolitical shifts and U.S. policy changes, with emerging markets—especially LatAm—seen as major opportunities.

• Direct Lending Advantages: Blue Owl offers borrowers fixed terms, fast execution, flexibility, and certainty—attractive features, especially to private equity-backed firms.
• Market Growth: Once limited to smaller deals, direct lending has scaled massively, now rivaling high-yield and syndicated loan markets, with billion-dollar loans becoming routine. Sophisticated PE firms increasingly prefer direct lending due to predictable terms, dedicated relationship management, and the ability to handle larger transactions seamlessly.
• Resilience to Volatility: Blue Owl focuses on stable, recession-resistant sectors like software and healthcare, with minimal exposure to tariff-sensitive industries or supply chain risk. With strong equity backing and conservative loan-to-value ratios, Blue Owl is structured to perform through economic downturns, maintaining steady income distributions.
• Volatility as Opportunity: Market disruptions tighten public markets, making Blue Owl’s certainty and structure more appealing—allowing them to command better terms and higher spreads.
• Competitive Edge: Blue Owl differentiates through scale—managing over $100B, offering institutional-grade underwriting, and leveraging low-cost financing unavailable to smaller entrants.
• Portfolio Fit: Designed for long-term income with low volatility, Blue Owl’s products may serve as a fixed income substitute—yielding high single-digit returns with strong downside protection.