Small-Cap Core Equity

• Product sheet and disclosures  
• Performance attribution report  

The investment objective of the Small-Cap Core Equity Style is to outperform, on a three- to five-year period, the total return of the Russell 2000 Index on the equity portion of the accounts we manage. Portfolios are managed with consideration to the amount of risk introduced by the disparity of the portfolio's construction versus the benchmark. Ziegler seeks to manage the portfolio so that we maximize the information ratio.

Style Summary

The Small-Cap Core Equity style employs Ziegler's Quantitative Research Strategy (QRS), a quantitative approach used to identify stocks that demonstrate a high potential for producing future excess returns. The process seeks to exploit anomalies in behavioral finance that are supported by academic and proprietary in-house research which suggests that investors have a tendency to form their expectations for future equity returns based upon past experience. Investors tend to "overreact" and extrapolate past performance too far into the future when forming their expectation for future growth. If their expectations are unreasonable, the over extrapolation produces a mispricing that provides an opportunity to capture excess returns. In a similar fashion, investors are often slow to incorporate new information when forming future returns expectations and such "underreaction" can also lead to mispricing.