Seth Smith

Provides financial services

USBAM’s investment process strives to preserve principal, maintain liquidity, manage risk to client parameters, and produce returns commensurate with client goals. The firm primarily utilizes fundamental analysis in managing client assets. They focus on taxable and tax-exempt high-quality fixed income securities with investment objectives of safety, liquidity, diversification and yield.

Black River Asset Management manages a wide variety of alternative investment strategies including rates, equities, commodities, emerging markets and private equity. The firm's rates strategy seeks consistent absolute returns with low volatility through the exploitation of relative value anomalies. The portfolio is net long liquidity, flat to long volatility, and long event risk. Products include sovereign debt (G10), supranational debt, federal agency debentures, pass-through securities semi/quasi governmental debt, futures and options. Black River focuses on macro-and micro- relative value strategies that include primarily arbitrage trading disciplines. Black River's equity strategy seeks consistent absolute returns through fundamental research driven strategies that combine both relative value and directional trading to capture bottom up and top down edge across multiple sectors and geographic regions. Event driven strategies include risk arbitrage, share class trading and the exploitation of holding company discounts. They also employ time series analysis and other modeling techniques to trade global equities using a systematic-driven quantitative approach. Their commodities strategy seeks consistent absolute returns in agricultural and energy commodities. They employ two broad strategies: directional and relative value. Directional trades, long or short, are generally driven by fundamental views based on supply and demand model assessments that identify prices that are inconsistent with market fundamentals. These trades include futures, swaps, equities or options in the underlying instruments. Relative value strategies may include intra-market positions (such as curve spreads, time spreads or geographical spreads), inter-market positions between correlated markets (such as soybean vs. meal), overlay strategies between market classes (such as equities overlay on commodity markets) or basis trades. Black River's emerging markets strategies include local markets and fx trading, sovereign fixed-income trading, equities trading and emerging market corporate credit trading. They employ a bottom up approach that allows portfolio managers to use allocated capital at their discretion within defined risk limits. Strategies are both directional and relative value, with a strong focus on macro economic fundamentals and political assessments. They measure and assess risk exposure across investments and down to the individual strategy level within each sub-fund, using a range of methods including VaR, stress tests and scenario analysis. They regularly review portfolio risk and investment opportunities across all sub-funds, re-allocating capital to maximize risk-adjusted returns. Black River's global private equity approach seeks to identify management teams, developers and entrepreneurs capable of capturing value in transitional environments due to macroeconomic factors, regulatory or political change and globalization. They participate in expansion capital, recapitalizations, structured equity and credit/project finance. They are particularly interested in the following sectors: food, sustainable agriculture, agriculture supply chain, renewable energy, traditional energy, natural resources, environmental sciences, infrastructure, transportation and logistics and general industrial.

Functions as a College/University

Functions as a College/University

Provides investment research

NAM provides its services across a broad array of fixed income, equity and other investment strategies, including in the broad categories of municipal bonds, taxable fixed income, global and international, value, growth and core, public real assets, asset allocation, quantitative/enhanced, alternative and customized strategies. Depending on the strategy, the firm invests in a variety of securities and other investments, including in certain cases derivatives, and employs various methods of analysis and investment techniques.