Mr. Buchwald: Logan was founded in 1993. It now has about 1.2 billion in assets. That's divided among domestic equities, both growth and value, fixed income and international. We serve predominantly high net worth and institutional clients on a separate account basis. Marvin and I are responsible for the domestic value portfolios as well as the international portfolios. Today we're going to talk primarily about the value portfolios. As I said, this firm was started as a growth shop back in 1993. Marvin and I joined in August 2000 and gave the firm some diversification in terms of what Logan can offer clients.
TWST: Focusing on the value side of your equity management, how have you been
coping with the turmoil in the markets and the economic slowdown, and how this
has impacted your investments?
Mr. Buchwald: As we'll discuss in more depth later in the interview, we manage
concentrated value portfolios, and one of the attributes of our investment
approach is that our portfolios hold up very well in down markets.
The last several quarters have provided ample evidence of that. More
specifically, if you look back over the last six quarters, you'll see that the
Russell 1000 Value Index has declined in each of those quarters, which may be
some kind of record. If you also look at Logan Value over that same period, you
will see that it has outperformed in each of those quarters. Last year was
obviously a very difficult year for the markets. Our benchmarks, which are the
Russell 1000 Value and the Russell 200 Value indexes, were both down around 37%.
However, our composite portfolio was down only about 22%. If you look back over
our 13-year history you will also see that our portfolio has provided quite a
bit of a protection over the long term as well. To a large extent, that downside
protection has allowed us to meaningfully outperform our benchmarks over the
last one, three, five and 10-year periods and since inception. By protecting the
downside, we give investors above market returns over the long term and we do it
with less risk as defined by either standard deviation or downside capture.
Tickers included in this excerpt: DD, KMB, MO, PM, VZ
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