Institutional Asset Management

True North Equities manages assets for a wide spread of institutional clients, including pension plans, publicly traded firms, associations and foundations. We seek to provide superior performance while controlling risk. The investment team at True North Equities has decades of experience in institutional asset management and uses a disciplined investment philosophy and integrated process focused on fundamentals.

Our Approach

The investment team at True North Equities works hard to provide our clients with above average, long-term risk adjusted returns. We follow a rigorous bottom-up approach with a strong emphasis on risk management. True North Equities handles all-equity and balanced accounts for institutional clients. Our equity investment method is best described as an all-capitalisation blend with a main focus on significant capitalisation value stocks.. We are patient value actors with a disciplined and time-tested strategy and process that are not swayed by market volatility.

Our Process

We start each institutional relationship by putting together an Investment Policy Statement (IPS) together with our client’s Investment Committee. This IPS with written objectives serves as the cornerstone and roadmap for managing the institutional portfolio and selecting equities.

Once the IPS is put together, portfolios are developed based on our comprehensive and unbiased process. We will offer out or reduce a position if its price goal is achieved, if we suspect diminishing company fundamentals or if the stock or sector weighting becomes overly concentrated. Our risk management approach includes reporting of intra-portfolio correlation, Active Share contributions of client positions and the betas and standard deviations of all of our equity holdings. We usually hold stocks for a period of three to five years, which translates into low portfolio turnover.

Our Philosophy

True North Equities was founded on Benjamin Graham’s principles of value investing:

• we seek to purchase securities trading at significant discounts to our internal assessment of their values;
• we strongly believe that dividends and interest are important components of return;
• we determine the “margin of safety” that will provide downside protection;
• simply put, we seek to purchase a dollars worth of assets for fifty cents.

We offer a blend of domestic and international equity accounts with the right mix of fixed income to minimise risk with the most reward.