Insights

The team at Advent has all been deeply affected and saddened by the senseless actions that have impacted our nation, including the killing of George Floyd. Society must recognize that discrimination is real and toxic.

In the attached paper, we briefly describe how convertibles have provided downside protection in this period of elevated market volatility, how the primary and secondary convertible markets continue to be quite active and offer opportunities that are worthy of consideration, and how convertible valuations are at their cheapest levels in nearly a decade.

COVID-19 has brought much disruption to our lives, our families, and economies around the globe. Before a treatment and/or vaccine arrives, testing will be one of the main tools that can start the easing of social distancing and help determine which healthcare workers are safe to go to work after exposure to the COVID-19 virus. Advent is very fortunate to have Doug Melancon, MD as our healthcare analyst with more than 26 years of experience covering the healthcare sector, an MD from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine and an MBA from the University of Illinois. In the attached paper, Doug explores the importance of the different tests available for COVID-19, including PCR and serology tests, as a potential tool to inform policy makers on when the economy can restart. We are aware that there is a lot of information being disseminated about the virus and we sought out to simply consolidate the facts about the various tests in development and how they can potentially stabilize our economy and bring our society back together.

Advent’s closed-end fund Associate Portfolio Manager, Tony Huang, highlights convertibles as an asset class and the benefit of convertible investing in closed-end funds with Money Life Podcast host Chuck Jaffe.

Advent’s President & CIO, Tracy Maitland, discusses with Barron’s wealth platform Penta to outline the basics of convertible bonds, why they can be a core strategy, and why high-net-worth investors may want to consider the asset class during the current market environment.

This paper examines why convertibles should be given full and fair consideration by investors even though the asset class’ positive asymmetry, demonstrating more equity-like characteristics on the upside and more bond-like attributes on the downside, is not always included in optimization models.

Advent Capital Management’s Barry Nelson explains what a convertible security is and why convertibles are an attractive investment option.

This paper updates an earlier version published in September 2014. We have extended our data set and added analysis of returns by rating bands. Our conclusions remain the same.