Year-End Review
I am pleased to share the Quantitative Equity team’s year-end performance overview. 2021 was a strong year for all of our quantitative equity portfolios, on both an absolute and relative basis. Following the COVID-driven market dislocations in 2020, last year saw the beginnings of a return to normalcy in the market, with stock prices more closely reflecting the fundamentals of underlying companies. Our stock selection models are grounded in fundamentals, so nearly all of the Value, Growth, and Quality components of our strategies worldwide contributed to outperformance.
Although we saw some market normalization last year, substantial imbalances persist, which we believe will provide opportunities for continued relative performance gains in 2022. In the video below, Patrick McDonough highlights some of these imbalances and reviews the key performance drivers supporting our strategies last year. All active managers experience performance cycles, and we believe we are on the threshold of a very favorable environment for quantitative strategies generally, and particularly for our unique investment process.
Our main objective is to deliver as promised to clients. To reach this goal, we regularly reassess and evolve our investment models, leveraging new data sources and advanced techniques to address the challenges of a changing market. Over the last year, we refreshed our investment approach by adding important innovations to our US, EAFE, and EM models. Enhancements included additions to our growth factor suite, portfolio construction advances, and the addition of top-down components and local data sources to our international strategies. In 2022, we will continue to evolve our Growth, Quality, and Value factors. To learn more about these enhancements I invite you to join Gavin Smith, Head of Equity Research, as he recaps the significant research projects we undertook in 2021 and also sheds some light on what’s to come in 2022 across our Quantitative Equity strategies.
I’m also happy to share that the Quantitative Equity family added a number of new members during 2021. The intense competition for top talent, as the economy recovered and people reassessed their goals, is well documented. Despite the challenges of this environment, we added several impressive individuals to our team last year, including two portfolio management associates, three research associates, and two implementation specialists that focus on evolving technology specifically for the investment team. These additions have given our more-seasoned investment professionals the opportunity to take on higher-value responsibility. We are proud to offer such a deep bench of investment and research professionals who have enthusiastically risen to their new challenges.
I am very proud of our team’s accomplishments in 2021, but even more excited about our prospects for 2022. We enter the new year with a world-class investment team, refreshed models, a robust research agenda, and a market environment that is very favorable to our investment strategy and process.
Best wishes for a healthy, prosperous New Year.
Stacie L. Mintz
Head of Quantitative Equity
Stacie L. Mintz