Wilmington Trust Launches New Brand to Extend Investment Reach

Wilmington Trust has created a new asset management brand to expand the reach of its proprietary suite of investment products including mutual funds, separately managed accounts, alternative funds and model portfolios.

Wilmington Investment Management, as the new brand is named, uses the same core investment tenets that underlie the investment approach of the 116-year-old firm with $98 billion in assets under management: a macroeconomic-led investment process with a focus on managing drawdown risk, minimizing tax liability, controlling investment costs and delivering superior risk-adjusted returns.

In introducing the new brand, Chief Investment Officer Tony Roth described a current late-cycle environment characterized by multiple concerns among investors — trade issues, an inverted yield curve, falling commodity prices and a likely earnings recession — that has many high-net-worth investors looking for downside protection.

“Clients are looking for opportunities to participate in the upside to some degree but what they really want is to protect the downside,” said Roth. “We don’t know whether the cycle will end imminently or in another year or so. Our view is that we will probably have recession after the election.”

The firm’s first biannual investment survey, released today, found that two-thirds of 500 high-net-worth investors 35 and older (with households with incomes of $225,000 and higher) are concerned about the downturn or recession hurting their retirement, and 61% are willing to forfeit growth for downside protection.

The survey also found that 88% of respondents consider low fees an important factor for investments (among 88% of respondents) and that 40% of investors with alternative investments view those investments as improving diversification and downside protection, with 68% of them expecting to increase allocations to alts in the next 12-18 months.