2018 Mid-Year Report: Achieving Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS)

One of Balentine’s differentiators is our track record and process. Bob Reiser—founder of Reiser & Associates, former Balentine & Company and Wilmington Trust CIO, and current Balentine Investment Strategy Team member—engineered the models in the late 1990s. In the ensuing years, our team has refined and honed Bob’s original insights over many asset classes. All models currently deployed by the Investment Strategy Team are fully proprietary to Balentine.

This summer, Balentine became GIPS® compliant. GIPS is globally administered and monitored by the CFA Institute and stands for Global Investment Performance Standards. Over the past six months, a dedicated team led by Chief Compliance Officer Erica Farber and Reporting Associate Jaclyn Kireyczyk have spent countless hours gathering the necessary data for our firm to become GIPS compliant.

While GIPS is common practice in the institutional world, only 1% of wealth management firms can make this claim.[1] GIPS compliant performance data provides current and prospective clients alike a greater level of confidence in the integrity of performance presentations, as well as the general practices of a compliant firm.

Achieving GIPS standards was a crucial part of our Global Asset Allocation (GAA) strategy. Since inception, Balentine has offered core public markets strategies to clients, as CFO David Damiani discussed in his white paper “To Diversify or Not To Diversify? What are the Questions?” As such, this growth into the institutional space, led by Director of Institutional Relationships Darlene van Nostrand, is a natural extension of these efforts.

Studies show that the vast majority of returns in a portfolio can be explained by the correct asset allocation. In other words, as long as the portfolio is in the right neighborhood, the specific street or house is not as crucial a factor in determining returns. Therefore, the goal of GAA is to eliminate or avoid asset classes that are not performing favorably and instead bias the portfolio to asset classes rising in value, enabling us to capture market opportunities from more strongly performing asset classes. Balentine’s approach to GAA is different in that we deploy our resources in areas that others, especially highly staffed and resourced firms, do not focus: a simple, disciplined, and repeatable process that is model driven and highly scalable.

[1] Source: Ashland Partners

Balentine LLC ("Balentine") is a registered investment adviser with United States Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance with the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. To obtain a compliant presentation or the firm’s composite descriptions, please email info@balentine.com. Balentine claims compliance with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®).