INVESTMENT STRATEGIES

Large Cap Core

Small/Mid Cap Core

All Cap Core

Sustainable Opportunities

Trillium manages equity, balanced, and fixed income portfolios for individuals with significant wealth, families, foundations, endowments, religious institutions, corporations, and other non-profits. Minimum relationship size is $2 million. Our equity investment style is “Growth at a Reasonable Price” or “Core” investing.  In addition to the strategies listed above we can create more customized portfolios, including ones that are animal testing free, fossil fuel free, and weapons free, as well as portfolios that reflect Catholic Values.

High Social Impact Investing

Many Trillium clients choose to expand their investments beyond publicly traded stocks and bonds to an asset class with particularly high social impact: community-based investments.

Trillium has a robust Community Investment program and provides administrative and analytical support to clients interested in direct investments in this financially under-served sector of the population. Investment opportunities in this sector include insured certificates of deposit placed with banks and credit unions, usually at prevailing market rates of interest, and promissory notes issued by domestic and international community development loan funds.

For over twenty-five years we have helped clients invest directly in communities through these vehicles, providing a unique managed portfolio approach that can be customized by geography, type of investment and risk/return expectations. Many investors choose to allocate a portion of their overall portfolio holdings (typically 1-10%) to this very special, high-impact asset class.

Balanced Account Management

Trillium offers balanced accounts in a range of allocations to meet specific financial objectives, from conservative to aggressive. Balanced accounts combine stock and bond investments in order to capture much of the return of an equity account with less exposure to declines in stock market prices.  Our fixed income discipline focuses on investment grade or better quality intermediate-term corporate, government agency, and/or municipal bonds. Our approach is a high quality, low turnover, diversified intermediate maturity style. This style is designed to allow bonds to serve their intended purpose in a balanced portfolio, which is to lower volatility and moderate exposure during an equity market downturn.

Individual Investors

Our investment management for individuals includes careful attention to both short- and long-term tax considerations, with the goal of maximizing after-tax returns.

  • Our equity discipline overall emphasizes low turnover and a long-term investment horizon for individual stocks. For taxable clients, each portfolio is customized to optimize after-tax returns, by offsetting capital gains where possible and carefully monitoring gains as they are accrued.
  • For clients who come to us with highly appreciated securities, we map out a personalized strategy to provide diversification and if appropriate, spread gains over time. Where clients desire, we coordinate tax strategies with meeting specific social goals, through gifting of appreciated assets and/or active stock ownership.
  • Depending on the client’s individual needs and risk tolerance, we may invest in tax exempt bonds to create a portfolio with maximum tax-free returns.
  • We work closely with each client’s professional advisors such as accountants, planners and attorneys, to coordinate investment gains with other taxable events.
  • Where desired, we will automatically pay quarterly tax estimates from a portfolio for clients.

Institutional Investors

Trillium offers institutional investors nearly three decades of experience in managing tax-exempt portfolios and related activities, such as developing and monitoring investment policy statements, presenting to investment committees, and working with third party consultants.

Beyond these traditional investment management services, however, we offer institutional clients the very special opportunity to integrate mission-related values with their investment portfolios, with the goal of enhancing the effectiveness of the institution’s programmatic work. Where desired, we help coordinate mission-related efforts with other activists who may share core values. These collaborations can be very powerful, and have historically been organized through the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (of which Trillium has long been an active member) and more recently, among environmental and labor groups.

Trillium has authored a report “Mission-Related Investing for Foundations and Non-Profit Organizations”  which outlines tools and strategies for mission and investment integration.  Click here to download a copy.