Sustainable Global Investment Grade Credit

Aiming to generate positive returns by identifying sustainable leaders

Reasons to invest

Seeking alpha and sustainable outcomes

We believe investing in sustainable leaders allows us to target superior financial and environmental performance relative to the benchmark.

Investment Grade Credit investing

The Global Investment Grade market offers a vast array of attractive investment opportunities in quality issuers, allowing for diversification across sectors, regions and capital structures.

Sustainable leaders

Identifying issuers that are ‘sustainable leaders’ – forward-thinking companies at the vanguard of their respective sectors who see value-creation in protecting the planet and provide sustainable products and services.

Positive screening

Our proprietary Sustainable Leaders (‘SL’) scoring methodology allows us to screen for companies that demonstrate best-in-class sustainability characteristics.

Values-based exclusions

Fossil fuels, weapons, tobacco, alcohol and a range of industries inhibiting the portfolio’s sustainable outcomes.

Engagement advantage

Best-practice integration of ESG and engagement insights.
Nachu Chockalingam

We seek to identify companies that are leading the way in sustainability. In doing so, we employ both positive and negative screening techniques to concentrate our investments in companies with best-in-class sustainability characteristics.

Nachu Chockalingham, CFA
Senior Credit Portfolio Manager

Why Sustainable Global Investment Grade Credit?

We aim to identify attractive investment grade corporate issuers that meet the sustainable requirements of the fund, where we see valuation anomalies across geographies, along credit curves, and within capital structures.

We invest in sustainable leaders – companies that are at the vanguard of their respective sectors who see value-creation in protecting the planet and provide sustainable products and services. We use our proprietary Sustainable Leaders or ‘SL’ score as a screening tool to refine our initial investment universe. The SL Score is a proprietary framework which provides an assessment of ranking and momentum in sustainability, focusing on non-fundamental risks. We score issuers on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 1 would reflect leaders with momentum, while any issuers scored 4 or 5 are excluded from the investment universe of the fund.
The strategy’s dual objectives are to achieve superior risk-adjusted returns and a reduced environmental footprint relative to the benchmark (in terms of a reduced carbon, water and waste footprint) – these are not independent goals. We seek to invest in companies that see value-creation in protecting the planet and provide sustainable products and services.

How we invest

High-conviction process
Duration and curve management
Active engagement to bring about change

Investment process

Company and security selection

We perform bottom-up sustainability research and analysis on a refined investment universe, with a focus on revenue alignment to the SDGs and sustainable indicators (water, waste and carbon footprint).

We assess companies’ operating, financial and ESG strengths, views that we combine with insights from analysts and engagements. Following this, we search for relative value across issuers’ capital structures.

Portfolio construction

Our credit scores and outputs from our bottom-up sustainability research determine our base position weights. In general, a high SL score will tend to equate to a higher weighting in the portfolio to reflect the maximum impact on the sustainable objective.

We refine the weightings based on the risk profile (convexity, liquidity, curve, instrument type, etc.) of securities.

Team

6259, 6203, 6229

Orla Garvey

Senior Fixed Income Portfolio Manager, Federated Hermes Limited

Nachu Chockalingam

Nachu Chockalingam, CFA

Senior Credit Portfolio Manager, Federated Hermes Limited

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