James Foster

Functions as a College/University

INTL Consilium specializes in emerging markets and convertible bond arbitrage investing. The firm offers investment products employing several strategies. Their emerging market absolute return strategy focuses on relative value trades in emerging markets which balance long positions against short positions to achieve absolute returns. Consilium's research approach combines fundamental, bottom up analysis, often done by their on-site analysts, with a top-down view of market liquidity, economic, political and industry-specific trends. Portfolio construction emphasizes low net market exposure, moderate use of leverage and effective diversification to minimize volatility. They may also use a variety of other strategies including corporate credit relative value, yield curve relative value, cross-country long/short, credit default swap basis, cross currency relative value, credit long/short, equity long/short and relative value, domestic international share class, relative value, capital structure share class relative value and stressed/special situations. Consilium's Africa Strategy focuses on capital appreciation and income through investments in debt and equity securities, in hard or local currency, listed locally or externally in any sovereign or corporate entity located in Africa and the Middle East. The strategy utilizes shorting and hedging to simultaneously reduce risk and generate extra income. The goal of the strategy is to produce consistent absolute returns while maintaining attractive risk-adjusted return profiles, regardless of global market conditions. Consilium also employs arbitrage strategies including convertible bond arbitrage, capital structure arbitrage and special situation arbitrage. These strategies are designed to produce returns not correlated with any major asset class. Capital preservation is their primary concern. Consilium seeks anomalous relative asset pricing and trading opportunities in capital markets, striving to arbitrage between the current perceptions of value rather than relying on the uncertainty of future value. Convertible bond arbitrage includes interest rate, equity derivative and credit arbitrage. This approach pursues traditional and more esoteric forms of arbitrage, without relying on high equity volatility and stable credit. Capital structure arbitrage involves the use of two classes of capital, usually of the same issuer. It usually uses a corporate bond, an equity option, equities or credit default swaps. It seeks to utilize the different value placed on a company's assets by the debt and equity markets, allowing a debt investment to be paired with an equity hedge or investment to produce an acceptable risk return profile. Consilium serves as the investment sub-adviser to two absolute return portfolio products that are part of the American Express World Express Funds family. They focus on emerging market debt combined with credit derivatives such as options, swaps and futures.