Products

FMA manages four principal products — small cap value, large cap value, large cap core, and core fixed income strategies. Since its inception, FMA has offered large cap and core fixed income products as separate account portfolios. FMA began managing small cap separate accounts in July 1994.

The components of the FMA investment process is a macro/sector overlay with a fundamentally driven stock selection process.

FMA uses a macroeconomic approach to identify broad themes that can be exploited through the portfolio's sector allocation and stock selection process. The FMA investment team meets regularly to analyze and evaluate the implications of broad macroeconomic themes, market developments, economic indicators, and sector trends. We evaluate the general level of economic activity, interest rates, core inflation trends, macro growth and profitability, business input costs, and observations.

FMA's investment staff is composed of two teams - small cap equity and large cap/fixed income, each of which is made up of research analysts and portfolio managers (also referred to as "team leaders"). All members of the investment team, including team leaders, are responsible for sector and industry analysis as well as stock selection for their assigned sectors. As such, two analysts, one from each equity team, analyze each sector.

Company-level research drives performance through value-added stock selection. We seek to identify companies with attractive relative valuations, strong earnings and cash flow growth prospects, healthy balance sheets, and excess cash flow. Our analysts focus on various fundamental factors including a company's ability to drive revenue growth, new product cycles, industry/sector spending dynamics, incremental margins, margin expansion from internal sources, operating and financial leverage, return-on-capital, and prospective earnings growth. After identifying potential investment candidates, our analysts continue the due diligence process, which includes discussions with company managements, formulating earnings and cash flow projections, identifying potential catalysts, gaining a market perspective of forward expectations from both proprietary and third-party resources, and assessing both macro- and company-specific risks for the company under consideration.