Profile: Canada is a strategic focus for Lazard. Lazard Asset Management LLC is the investment management subsidiary of Lazard Freres & Co, one of the world’s first global investment houses. Founded in New Orleans in 1848, Lazard's history has spanned market cycles, major political shifts, world wars, and vast technological changes. With more than 100 investment professionals working in five of its global offices, Lazard distinguishes itself through its adherence to its philosophy, its zeal for adding value with consistency over time, its team-oriented dynamic, and its global research platform of analysts.

Why Lazard: Lazard is a large, well-established manager with broad global research and portfolio management capabilities and a disciplined focus on managing risk for our clients. The Lazard approach blends highly experienced teams of senior portfolio managers with a global platform of analysts that provides worldwide access to markets, companies, and proprietary analysis that includes rigorous accounting validation and in-depth fundamental analysis. Clients benefit from the results of a unique perspective and fresh insight of Lazard's worldwide organization.

Style: The firm’s bottom-up approach to stock selection means that Lazard builds its portfolios one stock at a time. Lazard's style, grounded in a relative-value philosophy, requires a global perspective, a disciplined process, and the conviction to stay the course, over time, through market cycles.

Investment Philosophy: Lazard's investment professionals scan the world for opportunities and invest where value is found. The firm’s relative-value investment philosophy is based on the trade-off between the price that must be paid (i.e. price/earnings, price/book, price/sales, etc.) and what will be received in return (i.e. return on equity, operating margins, etc). Lazard’s research analysts and portfolio managers look at companies the same way strategic buyers do, comparing a company's ability to generate a sustainable return on investors' capital with its valuation.

Risk: Lazard considers risk monitoring critical. Investment professionals look at company-specific risk during the analysis of stocks, assess portfolio-risk in the context of the benchmark, and evaluate geopolitical risk during fundamental analysis and the formal portfolio risk process when Lazard's quantitative research team provides data, reports and processes.

Consistency is a trademark of Lazard's discipline. Lazard adheres to the firm’s style and does not take on additional risk to obtain short-term results. This is true even when the relative-value style is temporarily out of favor at a given point in the market cycle.