Manager Selection

Manager Selection – Institutions

Manager selection and manager due diligence are ongoing processes at Mason.  Once an institutional client’s asset allocation plan is designed, we work to determine which investments are appropriate for their portfolio.  We utilize both qualitative and quantitative analysis to determine which combination of investments is optimal.  A typical client’s portfolio will have a mix of active and passive investments and may have more than one fund per asset class.

As an independent firm with no proprietary products, we are free to search for solutions without the pressure to promote a certain fund or strategy.  This independence of thought can be seen in the unique and unexpected ways in which our manager research process has evolved.

We believe that Mason’s manager research process differs from the industry practice.  We begin the process with fund families versus specific asset classes.  Our goal is not to find the hottest manager with the best trailing performance in a specific asset class.  Rather, we attempt to find the best-performing fund families by analyzing the “aggregate investor’s experience” across the entire range of funds in each fund family.  In our fund family research, we include not only current “open” funds but also previously “closed” or merged funds.  In doing so, we feel that we can better assess the long-term success of investors in each fund family in total.  Once we have selected specific fund families, we compare their strengths to each asset class in our client’s portfolios.