Performance Trust Investment Advisors, LLC (PTIA), an affiliate company of Performance Trust Capital Partners, LLC, has launched its second mutual fund, the Performance Trust Municipal Bond Fund (PTIMX).
PTIMX is a no-load fund that invests in municipal bonds using deep sector and credit analysis and the Performance Trust Total Return methodology. The fund’s objective is to provide a high level of current interest income that is substantially exempt from regular federal income taxes and is consistent with preservation of capital while employing a strategy known as Shape Management.
Launching this municipal bond fund is part of PTIA’s ongoing business strategy to offer individual investors the same scenario-based total return methodology that’s available to its fixed-income institutional clients.
The fund’s value proposition is applying notable sector and credit analysis to predominately investment grade municipal bonds that are rated below Triple A (AAA or Aaa) and then subjecting those bonds to the additional scrutiny of the Shape Management strategy, which analyses potential capital appreciation and interest rate risk in a variety of up and down financial market scenarios.
The fund’s top credit analysis team is led by veteran municipal bond portfolio manager J Thomas Futrell, who recently joined PTIA after spending more than two decades managing municipal bond investments with Chicago-based Nuveen Investments. John Wilhelm, also a veteran of portfolio analysis and bond portfolio management at Nuveen, recently joined the municipal team to contribute his own considerable expertise to this new strategy.
"There is opportunity with distress, mispricing and inefficiencies in the financial markets," said Peter Cook (pictured), PTIA Chief Investment Officer. "The municipal market offers this opportunity, and our fund managers will use a rigorous approach in an effort to find those undervalued bonds that are likely to improve in credit quality in the future while also delivering tax-exempt interest income today," he says.
The minimum investment requirement in PTIMX is USD5,000.
