Fidelity's Pyramis Gets Serious

三年前，富达投资的顶级黄铜决定，他们必须在其机构资产管理手臂上工作。股票市场蓬勃发展，竞争对手的机构货币管理人员正在以两位数的年度价格增长，但美国零售基金业务的800英镑大猩猩仍然是养老金业务的边缘球员。自1964年以来，富达已管理此类资金，并于1981年创建了专门的机构销售和营销单位。但是，通过自己的入场，公司从未赋予业务所需的关注。投资组合管理人员并排运行机构资金与零售资金并排。彼得林奇的骑自由行车股票，菲律宾麦哲伦基金的着名前投资组合经理，陶德小型投资者，但渴望可预测性的企业养老基金CIO不安。富达也缺乏正在成为愤怒的替代投资产品。公司遭受高经理营业额和对其最大客户的漠不关心的声誉。

By the end of 2004, Fidelity had $102.3 billion in institutional assets separate from its huge retail 401(k) business. That was relatively paltry compared with the assets of competitors like BlackRock, which had $341.6 billion under management at the time, or Pacific Investment Management Co., which had $445.7 billion. “It’s fair to say that the institutional business was not growing as fast as we wanted,” says Robert Reynolds, the former Fidelity vice chairman and chief operating officer who is set this July to become president and CEO of rival Putnam Investments.

In May 2005, Reynolds and Fidelity CEO Edward (Ned) Johnson III responded with a sweeping reorganization. They carved out a new company exclusively dedicated to institutional business. It would manage equity and real estate investments itself, but its fixed-income assets would continue to be managed by Fidelity. They gave the stand-alone entity, dubbed Pyramis Global Advisors, a new home — in Rhode Island — sufficiently far from Fidelity’s 82 Devonshire Street address in Boston to bolster its independence. Pyramis hired an impressive lineup of executives, portfolio managers, analysts and traders, aiming to develop alternative strategies and products and provide institutional investors with more-stable investment management.

“It’s an impressive buildout in terms of the speed and quality of the people they’re bringing on board,” says Dan Lefkovitz, who followed Fidelity for Morningstar until mid-February, when he became the research and data firm’s head of European mutual fund research. But changes at the top at Pyramis have been unsettling. In the most recent move, last month Pyramis named Kevin Uebelein, the former chief investment officer for Prudential Financial’s international business, as its new president and CEO. Rodger Lawson, president since last July of Fidelity Investments, had previously been Uebelein’s boss as vice chairman of Prudential Financial. Uebelein will report to Michael Wilens, another new hire, who is Fidelity Investments’ head of asset management. Uebelein says his long-term goal is to make Pyramis an international competitor.

“The opportunity in institutional asset management is really global,” he notes. “Both Ned and Rodger want Pyramis to be a global company.”

Uebelein inherits an operation whose efforts have met with mixed success. Assets grew at a compound annual rate of 21.3 percent between June 30, 2005, and December 31, 2007, to $164 billion, according to Rogerscasey, a Darien, Connecticut–based institutional investment consulting firm. That compares favorably with the growth rates of its bigger competitors, most of which saw assets compound annually by 15 to 20 percent. Pyramis’s assets, however, subsequently declined to $157 billion under management at the end of the first quarter. Like other firms, it must contend with market turmoil that has broadsided its most successful strategies, including its Large Cap Core 130/30 strategy, which lost 15.5 percent in the first quarter, and its U.S. Equity Market Neutral strategy, which lost 7.88 percent. (Pyramis’s institutional fixed-income strategies, managed by Fidelity, were also hit during the first quarter.) Meanwhile, Pyramis has yet to grab much of a slice of the lucrative and growing alternative-investment market. Last year, according to Institutional Investor’s ranking of the 300 largest U.S. asset managers, alternatives like hedge funds, private equity and real estate made up the fastest-growing asset class, increasing $600 billion, to $1.9 trillion (see page 70). Just $4 billion, or 2.5 percent, of Pyramis’s assets is in alternative strategies.

Still, there appears to be no lack of confidence among the company’s leaders. “Over the next five years, we expect to see assets rise to two or three times their current level,” says Fidelity president Lawson. “We expect to see Pyramis grow faster than the rest of the company.”

“I don’t think the market has an appreciation yet for what they’re doing,” says Kevin Quirk, a partner at management consulting firm Casey Quirk in Darien, which has worked with Fidelity. “The market has a historic view of Fidelity: that it is a mutual fund company first and a company that works for institutions second. It is incumbent on Pyramis’s management to be very aggressive in communicating what they can do for clients now.”

忠诚的希望是陈列在一个500英亩的阵营us in Smithfield, Rhode Island, about an hour’s drive south of Boston, where a new $200 million, 577,000-square-foot building that will house the Pyramis headquarters is nearing completion. The glass, brick and limestone edifice will feature a trading platform at the hub of an open space the size of a football field — the brainchild of CIO Young Chin. “When you look at that space, you’ll see energy, passion and teamwork,” says Chin. “You’ll see how Fidelity has devoted all the necessary resources to building a world-class institutional asset management firm in a manner that only Fidelity can do.”

Pyramis now employs 142 investment professionals and is opening offices — its first overseas — in London and Hong Kong to house additional research analysts. (The firm plans eventually to have eight in London and ten in Hong Kong.) Among the key hires were Chin, a former president and CEO of Gartmore Global Investments; Mark Friebel, Barclays Global Investors’ former head of asset allocation and life-cycle funds, who now handles Pyramis’s life-cycle products; and 12 new investment managers.

Uebelein replaces recently retired CEO Peter Smail, who had been tapped to run the firm in 2005 by Fidelity chief Johnson. Smail announced his plans this January. Then in February, Drew Lawton, a Smail protégé and president of Pyramis Global Advisors Trust, the sales and marketing arm of the firm, announced his resignation effective at the end of that month. In April, Pyramis hired Patrick Mc Nelis, the former head of institutional advisory services for Principal Global Investors, to take Lawton’s place as executive vice president for global sales and distribution. The announcements were part of a slew of resignations and retirements of Fidelity executives in the past year. Many were associated with COO Reynolds, who retired in April 2007. Smail had worked for Reynolds for almost 18 years and joined Pyramis after heading Fidelity’s 401(k) and corporate outsourcing businesses. Of his decision to retire, Smail says: “I felt the timing would be good for me. I’m trying to get a better balance between work and my family.”

Some clients are wary of the changes. “Bob Reynolds and Peter Smail are people we have come to identify with Fidelity,” says Michael Travaglini, executive director of Massachusetts’ Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, a longtime Fidelity client. “We never like it when senior executives whom we like leave an organization. But we will give the company time.”

“We did this to dedicate resources to the market so we could do a better job for our institutional clients,” says Smail of Pyramis’s launch. “The heart of the decision was about market focus and specialization.”

当伊尔于2005年7月在波士顿的53个州街走进普瑞斯机构公司的临时总部时，他的第一任务是挑选一个名字。几周后 - 在富达的公司通信工作人员的帮助下 - 他定居在“Pyramis”上，一个富有忠诚的金字塔标志。

Just as important was choosing a CIO. Smail recruited Chin in March 2006 in a move that was considered a major blow to Gartmore. In his five years at Gartmore, Chin had built a fundamental and quantitative investment management process and a long-short capability for the firm. “The quantitative book at the company, which had been nonexistent in 2002, is now a $3 billion business for Gartmore,” says Paul Hondros, the former Gartmore Group CEO (and former Fidelity marketing executive) who had hired Chin. “There are not many people Fidelity could have recruited with his skills on the quantitative and client-service side of the business and his experience in building products that Fidelity is interested in developing.”

Before Pyramis’s creation, with Fidelity managing both the institutional assets and its $1 trillion in retail assets, the needs of the latter overshadowed those of the former. Regulatory restraints on portfolio disclosure, shorting and other techniques not allowed under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which governs mutual funds, were an impediment to managing the portfolios in a more institutional manner, says former COO Reynolds. Meanwhile, derivatives, frowned upon by retail mutual fund investors, were playing an increasingly important role in institutional portfolios. With Pyramis, money managers who had been serving two masters at Fidelity could focus on institutional clients, and the new firm could develop alternative strategies. Also, some separation from Fidelity would help Pyramis create a culture of investment management stability.

自从他抵达Pyramis以来，Cio Chin致力于开发旨在401（k）市场的产品。他还专注于创造一套替代产品，如市场中立策略，以及建立该公司长期的国内和国际股权产品。

Chin在Mark Friebel下创建了一项投资策略和资产分配集团，他们制定了BGI的第一个生命周期基金。“我们的小组是一项非常广泛的任务组成：发展资产分配作为Pyramis成功的基石，”Friebel说。“在看市场时，我们问自己，”我们在哪里可以立即发挥力量？“”在2007年第一季度，Pyramis推出了三个生命周期混合池，这家公司的第一个。是什么让生命周期发布独特，Friebel说，是游泳池底层的策略组合。与BGI的这种竞争对手不同，这依赖于定量和其他技术，或者是作为活动经理的T. Rowe Price，Pyramis提供了定量，主动和混合技术的组合。这种多元化的方法应提供更多的alpha和稳定性，Friebelsserts。

据管理咨询公司麦肯锡公司麦肯锡公司的说法，对传统唯一股权产品的保证金压力增加和资产上升的私募股权和对冲基金的一半率。替代投资对Pyramis的未来至关重要。下巴专注于公司在公司建立长期的能力。Pyramis聘请了33个基本和定量分析师 - 除了全球350个保险费分析师外，它还能够研究职业技术，研究潜在的短裤以及长的投资。

下巴表示，Pyramis没有计划启动对冲基金，更倾向于专注于130/30战略等替代品。“我们不提供对冲基金，”他说。“我们提供的是对冲基金使用的流程，策略和技术。我们的产品是低挥发性产品。我们专注于绝对回报。对冲基金是高风险的，杠杆制品。我们的产品旨在提供从多元化的性能来源提供良好的绝对回报。“

下巴还建立了公司的贸易业务，招聘贸易商在短销售中经历以及处理衍生品和系统交易策略。Pyramis’s desk, launched in July 2007, now employs seven traders and should expand to as many as a dozen under the direction of Michael McCauley, a Fidelity veteran who left the company in 2002 to become president of electronic brokerage firm Pulse Trading before returning as head of trading at Pyramis in 2005.

如他在Gartmore所做的那样，Chin正在与投资组合经理和分析师合作，扩大他们的短缺技能。一个令人鼓舞的例子是基于Pyramis成功的大帽核心长期策略的大帽核心130/30战略。130/30策略旨在维护与其标准差和差的500指数基准类似的风格和部门权重，同时通过股票选择将基准400个基点击败400个基点。该策略，1.27亿美元的资产，2007年表现卓越，返回30.05％以上的标准普尔500指数，24.56个百分点，并排名在昂迪马联盟的前4％的美国延伸美国130/30宇宙。Pyramis高管注意到他们的产品是市场中仅限于基于基本的130/30战略之一，这是一个基于竞争对手的优势，这是基于竞争的策略，这是去年8月受到打击的。

这一战略在2008年第一季度，当股票市场广泛地销售美国经济衰退，商品价格上涨和持续的次贷危机时，这一战略在2008年第一季度获得了大学。尽管如此，在一年中的前四个月，Pyramis从三个新客户吸引了1亿美元，其中包括由里士满，弗吉尼亚州的高级统治资源赞助的53亿美元的福利计划。亚博篮球怎么下串Dominion Assistant Guarluror Donald Borneman对Pyramis和PideLity的合并分析统一性留下了深刻的印象。“很难想象有人可以在这些家伙身上得到一个优势，”他说。

Chin is looking to leverage the long-short market-neutral record of Timothy Heffernan, who ran the U.S. equity market-neutral strategy for Fidelity for 17 years and now manages it for Pyramis. In his strategy, designed to provide returns 400 to 500 basis points above that of the three-month U.S. Treasury bill, long and short positions are managed to be neutral in regard to dollar, beta, market cap, style and sector exposure. “We are as pure market-neutral as anyone,” says Heffernan. “The strategy boils down to our ability to discriminate between the best and worst stocks in an industry sector.”

Heffernan和他的团队纷纷收回强劲的回报：去年该战略击败了20.36个百分点的基准。在今年的第一季度，Pyramis将现有客户升高其财务承诺和资产超过10亿美元的当现有客户提高时关闭了新投资的战略。该公司正在推出一系列全球版本的Heffernan的战略，预计将成为一系列新的市场中立产品。

下巴还致力于加强国内股权。在Pyramis管理的股票1000亿美元中，只需240亿美元就在美国股票。在公司的有问题产品中，它是它的大量增长战略，管理资产7.46亿美元，应成为市场领导者，鉴于富达对增长股的历史焦点。2007年，它落后于667个基点的罗素1000指数增长基准，降落于其积累联盟宇宙的第99百分位数。Pyramis的大型价值提供，超过22亿美元的资产，最终在2007年12月31日止了一年和三年期间的回报率。

“在过去的五年里,我想不出一个本月ance in which we have recommended one of their domestic equity offerings,” says Soon Yong Park, head of traditional manager research for Rogers-casey. “Their offerings just have not been as compelling in relation to their peers’.”

Says another consultant, who declined to speak for attribution: “The problem has been a revolving door of managers on the mutual fund side, which has reflected poorly on Pyramis. The investment strategies are a moving target. There’s just not a lot of consistency there.”

“Consultants perhaps have not heard the full story,” counters Chin. “Pyramis is intended to give focus, stability and consistency to our investment operations. We are looking to address those issues and to hold ourselves to an institutional standard.”

Indeed, Pyramis has taken on 12 new portfolio managers, eight of whom work on domestic equities. It has added capacity in the midcap growth sphere with hires like Daniel Crowe, who ran Dreyfus Founders Mid-Cap Growth Fund, the top-ranked U.S. fund for total return for the one-year period ended December 2006. And the firm has made changes in the management of its struggling large-cap growth strategy. Going forward, Pyramis can count on some important advantages. On the asset front, the firm’s $76 billion in international equity strategies is a strong suit. “If you’re going to have a trump card, this is the one to have,” says Benjamin Phillips, head of strategic analysis at New York–based investment bank Putnam Lovell. “Long-only global equities are the most sought-after asset class by institutional investors around the world.”

Some $22 billion of these assets are in the firm’s successful Select international strategies. These strategies pick stocks rated as attractive by Pyramis and Fidelity analysts worldwide; quantitative models are then used to match the regional weights of the portfolios to their benchmarks. Pyramis portfolio manager Cesar Hernandez developed the framework for the strategy in 1989 at Fidelity and continues to oversee the core group of offerings, including Select International, Select Global, Select Europe and Select Pacific. In 2001 he turned over management of Select Small Cap to Robert Feldman, who has compiled an outstanding record: Last year the strategy beat its benchmark by 11.43 percentage points.

富达的固定收益产品一直是one of the company’s strengths, representing one third of assets. When Johnson and Reynolds created Pyramis, they left management of the institutional fixed-income group with the corporate parent because of economies of scale. Fidelity’s fixed-income operations remain organized around specific strategies in which teams manage both retail and institutional assets. The core investment-grade fixed-income strategy is sold as the Broad Market Duration commingled pool on the institutional side and as the Fidelity Investment Grade Bond mutual fund to retail clients.

但该公司的固定收入申报已经受到次级抵押贷款市场的问题难以置疑。The Broad Market Duration and Core Plus strategies, which account for $35 billion of the $50 billion in institutional fixed-income assets under management, underperformed the Lehman Brothers U.S. aggregate index by 167 and 253 basis points, respectively, in 2007. But sales remain steady: Fidelity attracted $5 billion in fixed-income assets last year, about equal to the amount in 2006, and it has added $2 billion in assets so far in 2008.

Institutional investors are taking notice of Pyramis’s efforts. Through the first four months of this year, the firm won commitments of $5 billion in new mandates and is in discussions on an additional $10 billion. Among the firm’s big wins is a new $600 million active international equity mandate from the Massachusetts PRIM Board, which manages $50 billion in retirement assets for state employees and teachers. The mandate had formerly been managed by local rivals State Street Global Advisors and Boston Co.

该公司在裁定缴费计划市场方面取得了显着进展，在那里它销售其新的生命周期混合池给大型赞助商。60亿美元的Pyramis在其生命周期提出中收集的，是长期保真客户的20亿美元401（k）公司的资产。2007年3月，转基金从富达的生命周期相互资金交换出来，进入了Pyramis的混合池。这构成了蚕食保真度的共同基金销售吗？不是据前首席执行官的临时。“如果客户想要机构产品，如果我们不提供它们，它会从其他人那里得到他们，”他说。

But Pyramis needs to do more to meet institutional investors’ demand for long-duration strategies. And although the firm is making progress in creating alternative strategies, the $4 billion business remains small compared with JPMorgan Asset Management’s $84.7 billion in alternatives or Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s $95.6 billion. Some investment consultants remain skeptical as to whether Pyramis can train its long-only equity managers to short stocks with the same skill as managers with longer track records. “They need to prove to the marketplace that they are not a work in progress,” says Rogerscasey’s Park.

该公司还面临内部挑战。搬到史密斯菲尔德，距离波士顿郊区的长途驾驶，其中许多Pyramis员工生活，由下巴设计的开放式平面图没有普遍鼓掌。“此举将缩小对为Pyramis工作有兴趣的人领域，”一位执行招聘人员说。但前首席执行官秘密纠纷争议罗德岛地点是一个问题：“我们绝对没有招聘人才。”

Smail相信他所叫的公司的成长很好。“我们从力量的巨大地位开始。我们拥有最大的401（k）业务，是最大的DB业务之一，我们有一个巨大的客户群，“他说。

他不孤立于他的信心。“他们有很多优势：客户关系，研究马力，他们的执行非常擅长，”投资咨询公司Callan Associates总裁Gregory Allen说。“如果他们没有成功，我会被象征着。”