WATER COOLER CHATS

Javier Arias
Vice President
Manager Research

Find me on LinkedIn

To keep you up-to-speed on all things asset class, we’re pulling one of our manager research specialists aside each quarter to chat over the water cooler and find out what they’re up to.

This quarter, we spoke to Javier Arias, our fixed income specialist.

Which asset classes do you cover?

I’m a member of Redington’s fixed income research team, responsible for emerging market debt and investment grade corporate markets.

What ideas have you been working on lately?

One of the core objectives of our research team is to identify under-researched areas that might be of potential interest to our clients. I’ve been working closely with our private credit team to source investment opportunities in the emerging market private credit space, which appears to be particularly attractive in the current market conditions. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but you can expect to see further developments in this area over the coming months.

WATER COOLER CHATS

Meet our fixed income specialist

What are the highlights of the past 12 months?

Over the last year, I’ve led our research efforts to identify best-in-class investment strategies across the emerging market debt spectrum. We now have Preferred managers in emerging market hard currency sovereigns, local currency sovereigns, corporates and blended debt. The research process involved more than 60 manager meetings, covering an extensive range of the sub-asset classes, and has enabled us to expand the emerging market debt offering available to our clients across various investment requirements. Meeting and interacting with dozens of portfolio managers with a widely diverse set of ethnic backgrounds and areas of expertise was not only a highlight of the last 12 months, but also a highlight of my career.

What do the next 12 months look like?

We’re in the process of broadening our existing coverage of the emerging market debt blended universe. This consists of managers that invest in both emerging market sovereigns and corporates in US dollars and locally denominated currencies. The objective is to identify managers that follow a total return approach and are benchmark unconstrained, alongside managers that closely follow a reference benchmark for portfolio construction.

What makes you tick outside of work?

When I was five years old, my parents enrolled me in a summer camp that offered a broad range of activities: everything from Karate to baseball – it was here that I first watched a game of tennis. I immediately fell in love with the sport and asked for a racket for Christmas. I’ve been playing the sport ever since, only stopping for a few years when I first came to the UK in 2016. I’ve recently moved to a new area of SW London that offers unlimited court usage for a £55 annual fee, which by London standards is a bargain! So when I’m not trying to make sense of the markets, you can find me on one of the local courts. Pro-tip for tennis in London: always keep a set of dirty balls for when it rains – there’s no worse feeling than ruining a fresh set.