Mr. Krebs: I think that we have been doing quite well. We have weathered the storm. The Fund has been excellent. We have a lot of milestones. The one-year return through the end of April is 15.4% and that compares tremendously favorably with the S&P 500, which is off 4.5%. So we have done very well. We were ranked among the category kings in The Wall Street Journal for our classification — multi-cap growth — in the fourth quarter of last year and in the first quarter of this year. We were among the top 10 performers in that group for those annualized time frames. So we are quite pleased with how things are going. We are pleased with our ability to expand our distribution of the fund and to make it available to more people. We continue to be well positioned to attempt to replicate that type of performance, but that sets the bar incredibly high. We hope to continue to do quite well.
TWST: Would you tell us more about the Core Equity Fund?
Mr. Krebs: The Core Equity Fund is an all-cap investment vehicle. We started it
almost three years ago. We will have a three-year track record in August of this
year. It is a continuation of the investment strategy that has been utilized in-
house here at Cookson Peirce for almost 25 years. Previously, we had sold our
investment advice to private clients (high net-worth individuals) directly, but
we made a bit of a strategic change about three years ago to make our services
available to a broader audience by creating the mutual fund and making our
portfolio available through different sponsor programs — through separately
managed accounts.
Our core strategy is the all-cap equity strategy. That is the strategy that is
utilized in the Cookson Peirce Core Equity Fund. It is an all-cap strategy based
upon a quantitative methodology, which we describe as style agnostic, meaning
that we aren't attempting to fill any style boxes from the Morningstar
standpoint. We are attempting to buy investments that will produce alpha. We
believe that we can identify securities that will outperform in an annualized
time frame — about a 12-month holding period, maybe slightly longer than that.
We are going to buy those securities to build the portfolio that will perform
best.
The underlying portfolio constraints are rather loose. We want to target those
investments that we think will outperform. It is not trying to back into some
sort of index weightings, factor weightings, or something of that nature. It's a
stock-picker's fund. We think that with that strategy, as witnessed over the
history of this firm and over the history of this mutual fund, we can do quite
well.
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