Dear Clients and Friends:
III Associates celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. As we reflect on a quarter century of service to our investors, we want to thank you for your confidence and support and for the role you have played in our success. Milestones like this one present an ideal opportunity to reflect on our accomplishments, reaffirm our principles and define some future goals.
Building on our legacy
Since opening our doors in 1982, III has worked diligently to earn investor trust by building a company that puts character and integrity first. Today, with over $3.5 billion under management in several investment funds, we continue to operate from the same character-based foundation, utilizing the same principles we started with 25 years ago. Those principles include:
- Upholding the highest standards of personal and professional integrity
- Communicating with our investors in an open, transparent and candid manner
- Investing your money where we believe we have a demonstrable edge
- Understanding and managing the risks inherent in our business and in our strategies
- Attracting, developing and retaining outstanding talent at all levels of the Firm
- Developing, enhancing and maintaining state-of-the-art infrastructure and financial controls
- Fostering a culture of accomplishment and innovation that is also supportive, diverse and positive
Continued Innovation
Over the past 25 years, III has developed and managed strategies that are designed to generate superior returns while managing volatility. By favoring defined risk strategies, identifying market anomalies and other unusual opportunity sets, and adhering to rigorous, proprietary risk management principles, III has historically achieved its goal of superior risk-adjusted returns. Our high levels of employee and principal co-investment ensure alignment of interest and intense commitment.
From pioneering techniques for hedging mortgage backed securities to creating new securities types and to the development of exchange traded instruments, III has always been at the forefront of financial engineering and innovation. In order to maintain our edge, we continue to apply our rigorous investment techniques and standards to new markets and products. Examples include our successful expansion into relative value credit trading and the development of our latest fund offerings designed to take advantage of potential spread widening across all credit markets. In the background, as always, we continue to build state-of-the-art systems and other infrastructure, including proprietary trading, risk management, accounting and clearing.
Our primary mission remains to identify and exploit pricing anomalies and other relative value opportunities, focusing mainly on the highest quality assets, while managing the risks inherent in today’s fluid and fast-moving markets. As we move into our second quarter-century, we will build on our core strengths and investment philosophy, while maintaining our rigorous standards and principles.
Looking forward
In the coming months, one of our immediate goals is to enhance our investor reporting and dialogue. Quarterly updates from our portfolio managers will recap key strategies and provide strategic outlook for the future in greater detail. Our III web site, which was one of the earliest and most complete in the industry, is being redesigned to provide even greater transparency and ease of use. On the product front, you can expect us to continue to expand our offerings as we move opportunistically toward a multi-strategy platform.
In closing, we again want to assure you that we will continue to maintain our standards and to work hard to keep your trust in III as we build on our legacy as a world-class organization that exemplifies the best in integrity, innovation and investment management expertise. We are very proud of what we have accomplished with you to date, and we hope you share our excitement and confidence in our future plans.
We look forward to our next quarter century together.
Again, thank you for your support.
Warm regards,
Cliff Viner
III Associates