The Investment Policy Group (“IPG”), comprised of all portfolio managers and research analysts, is the catalyst in our decision-making process. Portfolio policy and stock selection are reviewed at IPG meetings. Specific decisions regarding purchases and sales, as well as the percent of the portfolio any security is to represent, are based on consensus resulting from these meetings and are implemented across all accounts within a strategy unless there are specific client restrictions. In fully discretionary accounts with no client restrictions, the portfolio managers have no discretion to enact trades that are not approved by the IPG.

As the markets do not operate in a vacuum, the IPG also meets twice a month to discuss macroeconomic issues. In these meetings, the IPG makes short-term economic forecasts and systematically reviews long-term economic, social, political and demographic trends having important influences on the financial markets and the companies that we follow. Sector and industry group allocation may be confirmed by this top-down thinking.