Fixed Income

Aberdeen’s fixed income process dates back to the 1980s. Its core characteristics are a focus on proprietary research, identifying the opportunities with attractive risk-reward characteristics and combining different and uncorrelated sources of outperformance, known as alpha.

• Active management, operating globally, aiming to deliver outperformance
• Belief that diversified sources of added value improve the risk-return profile
• Decisions made by specialists, within allocated risk budgets
• Local presence in London, Philadelphia, Singapore and Sydney
• Strong derivatives capability for both active and liability management

Our discrete alpha teams cover five areas of expertise, each of which operates independently of the other. These areas are investment grade credit, high yield, emerging market debt, interest rates and currency.

Fixed Income Investment Process

Fixed Income Breakdown

Active management:

We aim to add value by exploiting market inefficiencies in interest rates, currency, investment grade credit, emerging market debt and high yield. We have dedicated portfolio managers and analysts in the three main time zones. They operate as close-knit teams, with investment decision-making devolved to specialists, based on their knowledge and expertise.

Team Approach:

We employ over 142 investment professionals across our teams. They invest within clearly delineated parameters, with defined reporting lines. Our team structure is based on transparency and accountability.

Flexible and disciplined investment process:

Our investment structure enables us not only to follow a disciplined investment process but also to be flexible to manage portfolios for a wide variety of client requirements. This may range from strategies which employ multiple sources of uncorrelated returns to those that are focused on a particular specialist area.

Diverse solutions:

Many clients are moving to higher performance or core plus mandates. Another trend is the move away from market-based indices and the use of liability driven benchmarks. We aim to deliver performance across the full range of our fixed income capabilities. We also use derivatives, such as interest rate and credit default swaps, to add value and also to match liability exposures.