FUND COMMENTARY
By Graham Wong, CFA, Senior Portfolio Manager | 10/31/2023
10/31/2023
Portfolio manager Graham Wong, CFA, discusses how his team analyzes banks to identify those with strong risk management.
With bank investing, risk management is always the number one key. Understanding risk culture, whether it’s leverage and credit underwriting, which was last cycle’s problem; or balance sheet management, which is this cycle’s problem. Because of our focus on risk culture, the banks that we hold in the Fund have performed pretty well during this period.
In terms of the overall banking system, our work shows that it’s not a systemic risk. We believe that there are a handful of bad players that didn’t manage risk properly as rates rose. We’re monitoring emergency lending data that comes out on Thursdays and weekly deposit data that comes out on Fridays to make sure that our conclusion is correct.
Lastly, in terms of stock picking in this area, we really dig into the 10Qs and 10Ks, we look for liquidity, capital and other disclosures to make sure that we own well-capitalized banks with strong risk management, high quality deposits that will take market share in this environment.
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