Jeff Kraus

Wintrust Capital Management's investment philosophy focuses on building fully-invested, comprehensive portfolios. The firm invests in high-quality companies across all sectors. Their investments include: domestic and international equities, ETFs, taxable and tax-free fixed-income securities, mutual funds, options and unit investment trusts (UITs). Wintrust targets companies with superior earnings growth and positive momentum in growth. The firm seeks to invest in the stocks of these companies when their stocks are trading at reasonable valuations. Wintrust does not attempt to time the market. The firm's security selection process is based on a combination of rigorous fundamental and robust multi-factor quantitative screening. Their investment horizon is 1 to 3 years. Wintrust believes this is a sufficient timeframe to allow their investment thesis to play out, while being short enough to remove emotion from stock selection. Wintrust employs thorough testing and consistent strategies to prevent portfolios from holding a security too long should a company's fundamentals fall outside the firm's core purchase parameters. Their investment approach also allows for movement within the portfolio if more attractive investment opportunities are identified. Wintrust believes that proper diversification is the best means to control non-market risk. The firm seeks to control risk by maintaining disciplined portfolio constraints. They carefully and consistently monitor each portfolio's sector, industry, security, style and size weightings to prevent being over- or under-exposed to each particular area relative to the overall market. Greater or lesser weightings within each of these areas are based on Wintrust's view of the economy and markets. Their objective is to provide greater portfolio returns than the market. Wintrust utilizes 5 complementary investment products to build portfolios: (1) large-cap growth (2) mid-cap growth (3) blended growth (4) TSSA and (5) PathMaster. The firm's large-cap growth strategy is suitable for clients seeking individual position management and investments in primarily larger, more seasoned companies. For this strategy Wintrust employs a disciplined, quantitative investment approach that includes a fundamental overlay. Wintrust's mid-cap growth strategy is suitable for clients seeking capital appreciation through investments in individual positions in growth companies with market-caps of $1 billion to $15 billion. In this strategy, the firm begins with a company's fundamentals and then adds a quantitative overlay. The firm's blended growth strategy is suitable for clients that prefer customized, individual position management within the full spectrum of the stock market, including investments that range from international stocks to large-cap stocks. Wintrust begins with a blended portfolio from their large- and mid-cap stock universe and then employ an ETF strategy to gain exposure to international and small-cap benchmarks. Wintrust's quantitatively-based style and size portfolio is referred to as TSSA. This strategy is suitable for clients seeking a diversified portfolio without active investment management. The program uses a quantitatively-driven, bottom-up, multi-factor model that is designed to predict shifts in size and style of equity index performance. Wintrust utilizes 6 ETFs to offer 3 portfolios that are constructed based on the following risk levels: conservative, moderate and aggressive. Wintrust's domestic equity mutual fund, PathMaster, mirrors their moderate TSSA model. The fund's objective is long-term capital growth. Wintrust seeks to achieve this goal by investing primarily in ETFs that track certain domestic equity market segments by size and style and offer the greatest potential for capital appreciation in a given market environment. Fixed-income investments may be added to any of Wintrust's investment strategies to mitigate volatility and generate income. The firm also offers other managed money programs including proprietary and third party management, separately managed accounts (SMAs), optimal blend portfolios and mutual fund wrap programs. Though not limited by sector, Wintrust tends to invest in the stocks of US companies in the producer manufacturing, consumer non-durables, finance and energy minerals sectors. The firm invests across all market-caps, with emphasis on the stocks of large-cap companies. Wintrust maintains a very low turnover rate.

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