Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, LLC (KoCAA), a New Haven-based asset management and investment firm, with more than $24 billion assets under management, announced today that it has entered into an agreement to purchase the assets related to the institutional management business of Boston Advisors, LLC.

We approach fixed-income investing by first evaluating the relative attractiveness of various fixed-income sectors. We are conscious of the underlying sector weights of the benchmark, but sector weights are the residual of security selection. Within our process, the fixed-income market is broken into two segments — corporate credit and structured credit — with specific evaluation variables for each area of the market. We do not believe there is a high probability of generating long-term out performance by using interest rate management as a primary investment tactic. Therefore, we do not attempt to anticipate interest rates. Instead, our focus is on top-down sector allocation and bottom-up security selection. Our fixed income team is comprised of the same team of portfolio managers, credit analysts and traders that manage fixed-income assets for the Knights of Columbus.

Boston Advisors, a division of Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, manages equity strategies on behalf of the Knights of Columbus Funds family and Knights of Columbus. Founded in 1982, Boston Advisors has collaboratively managed Knights of Columbus’ general assets and affiliated accounts through various equity investments since 2011. Boston Advisors approaches equity investing by looking at companies in two ways — quantitatively and fundamentally. Both fundamental and quantitative inputs drive the equity investment team’s decision making. This hybrid investment approach combines sophisticated, proprietary quantitative modeling with fundamental research. It is during the fundamental review that portfolio managers collaborate to interpret the data, carefully considering what the quantitative models are indicating, within the context of current stock ranking, market environment and valuation information. Our relationship with Boston Advisors is an additional aspect of the strategic vision that Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors brings to investors.