Lincluden Investment Management

Mission Statement

Lincluden strives to be the investment manager of choice for endowments, corporations and individuals who are seeking long term peace of mind for the management of their investment portfolios from a team that ensures that clients’ needs are met first.

We will earn our clients’ confidence by consistently investing with prudence and integrity and through exhibiting conviction in value-based portfolio decisions. Communication will be thorough and responsive to clients’ needs for meaningful and timely information.

We will conduct ourselves with the utmost integrity and respect in our relationships with clients, suppliers and each other.

Our success will be measured by our ability to exceed the expectations of our clients and to create a working environment that while professional, collegial, energetic and fun, most importantly fosters a collective responsibility for achieving this goal.

Investment Philosophy

Lincluden Investment Management offers a clearly defined investment philosophy and approach to portfolio construction in the following areas:

Equities

Fixed Income

Balanced

Value Investment Philosophy

As value investors we believe that financial markets are efficient in the long run but can be inefficient in the short and medium term. The investment process that we employ focuses on identifying mispriced securities to create diversified client portfolios that will outperform over time. Our goal is to identify securities that trade at a discount to our appraisal of their intrinsic or true economic value. This approach acts as a buffer from further price decline and offers the potential for greater capital appreciation.

We invest with a long-term focus, we perform our own research and we follow a strict price discipline when purchasing and selling securities. Performing our own research gives us the conviction to construct focused portfolios of our best ideas.

Equities

Our portfolio managers screen a broad universe of Canadian, U.S. and international stocks in our ongoing search for undervalued securities. Investment decisions are based on a thorough financial assessment of corporations and their management teams to identify securities that are trading at a substantial discount to our appraisal of their fair value.

Our focus on cash flow in determining a company’s valuation is based on our belief that free cash flow is the best currency to enable a company to grow. By relying on our own original, in-depth research – a cornerstone of our investment process – our portfolio managers are able to act with confidence and conviction when investing in out-of-favor securities. Their disciplined investment process allows them to:

Analyze a working company over a representative time frame in order to effectively explore potential

price disparities;

Estimate current and future normalized cash flows for a company;
Use our proprietary discounted cash flow valuation process to accurately value a company and its

stock; and

Buy stocks at a discount.

Fixed Income

We believe that the economy and financial markets are cyclical in nature, and that the markets are not always efficient in recognizing value and risk. Our fixed income portfolios are structured to achieve the most efficient combination of duration, credit, yield curve and foreign exposure from a long-term, risk-reward perspective.

Our investment process begins with an economic overview, which allows us to develop a view on inflation – the key determinant of interest rates. Based on our view of value and risk, we then determine the appropriate portfolio duration which reflects our long-term view of inflationary trends relative to the current level of interest rates and shape of the yield curve. We believe that real interest rates should be calculated using long-term inflationary expectations instead of the current rate of inflation.

Our exposure to credit risk through corporate, provincial and municipal government issues is a reflection of our diligent risk-reward analysis and detailed credit analysis. We do not rely on rating agency reports to make our investment decisions; instead, we emphasize internal analysis by the fixed income team, with support from the equity team.

In searching for the best value opportunities in fixed income markets, we consider both domestic and foreign securities. When we find better value opportunities in foreign markets, our preference is to eliminate foreign exchange risk through the use of hedging.

Balanced

Creating long-term wealth with a value-based, risk-managed approach requires disciplined asset allocation and security selection. Lincluden’s valuation and portfolio structuring process incorporates a “top-down” approach to determine asset mix, and a “bottom-up” process to individual security selection. Our methodology factors in the fundamental long-term earning power of corporations, long-term interest rates and the dynamics of rapid asset re-pricing.

Balanced portfolios benefit from the insights of Lincluden’s entire team of investment professionals. Based on analysis and discussion of interest rates, the inflationary outlook, and corporate profitability, we review the asset allocation weekly. Policy changes are generally incremental, reflecting Lincluden’s long-term orientation. These changes reflect actual client benchmarks, but in the absence of client constraints, they will range from +10% to -15% of the equity component of a 60% equity/40% fixed-income benchmark.

Source: Lincluden Investment Management