Our investment team has been purposefully structured to bring together diverse cultures and experiences, political views, and economic schools of thought.
Templeton Global Macro utilizes a research-intensive, fundamentals-based, high-conviction approach to aim to capitalize on short-term inefficiencies and capture long-term potential value in global fixed income markets.
What We Do
Why Consider Templeton Global Macro?
A Multicultural Team Built for Cognitive Diversity
A Holistic, Research-Intensive Approach
We integrate global macroeconomic analysis with in-depth country research and ESG indicators to seek to identify imbalances across three sources of alpha: yield curves (interest rates), currencies and credit spreads.
A High Conviction Process, Integrated with Robust Risk Management
We utilize multiple research lenses to identify opportunities that stem from the intersection of economics, politics and markets. Risk management is incorporated at every stage of the investment process, monitoring the sources and level of risk in each portfolio and ensuring that risk allocations are commensurate with our forward-looking investment views.
A diverse team of experts, including:
Highly trained Ph.D. economists within the research team
Quantitative analysts with degrees in computer science and engineering
Dedicated traders, specialized by region, utilizing a 24-hour global trading platform
Over a dozen nationalities from multiple continents represented*
Proficiency in over one dozen languages*
A leadership team that has worked together for over 15 years, with a combined average investment experience of more than 20 years.*
Michael Hasenstab, PH.D.
Executive Vice President, Portfolio Manager
Chief Investment Officer
30 years experience
Calvin Ho, PH.D.
Senior Vice President, Portfolio Manager
Director of Research
19 years experience
Christine Yuhui Zhu
Senior Vice President, Portfolio Manager
Director of Portfolio Construction & Trading
22 years experience
*As of 9/30/2025
Investment Philosophy
We believe that an unconstrained approach to fixed income investing enhances long-term value potential. Therefore, we look beyond the constituents of traditional market benchmarks for what we think are the most compelling investment opportunities. Using a benchmark-agnostic approach, we seek alignment across multiple research lenses ─ in-depth country analysis, ESG indicators, macroeconomic modeling, and local perspectives ─ to uncover high conviction opportunities across our three sources of alpha: yield curves (interest rates), currencies, and credit spreads.
An Unconstrained Worldview
Benchmarks tend to be concentrated in the most indebted countries by design. We focus on investments in areas that we believe offer the best total return potential rather than on benchmark-oriented positions.
We look at risk on an absolute basis, preferring value at risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (conditional VaR) to tracking error against a benchmark.
Integrating Global Macroeconomic Analysis and ESG Indicators
In-depth country research focuses on long-term macroeconomic fundamentals to sift through short-term noise. In-person country visits are often a component, serving as a means to gather both information and a deeper insight that would otherwise be unavailable.
We believe ESG is most effective as an investment tool when fully integrated into the other components of research, rather than as a screen or exclusionary metric. For sovereign issuers, we integrate a proprietary ESG rating methodology as part of our research process (the Templeton Global Macro ESG Index, or TGM-ESGI).
Actively Allocating across Three Independent Potential Sources of Alpha
Potential alpha sources vary country by country over time, providing the opportunity for uncorrelated return streams within our portfolios.
The flexibility of our strategies allows us to seek returns and provide potential diversification benefits to an overall portfolio during all phases of the investment cycle.
Investment Process
Our research focuses on developing a deep understanding of macroeconomic and political differences, country by country. Paired with our top-down views, we aim to identify opportunities to add value through our three independent sources of alpha. Trade ideas are routed through the quantitative analysis and trading teams who work in collaboration with the portfolio managers, where the resulting portfolio seeks to balance downside risk, expected return and liquidity.
Our portfolios are built according to a specific risk budget that focuses on absolute measures of risk. The contribution to total portfolio risk across the three sources of potential alpha can shift based on relative value and our macroeconomic outlook, and one specific source may be overweighted or even avoided for an extended period of time. This flexibility allows our strategies to position for varying economic and market environments.
The portfolio composition, characteristics and the number of exposures held by the portfolio will vary due to a variety of factors, such as, but not limited to, market conditions, asset size, interest rates, currency fluctuations, economic instability, and political developments. The above chart is for illustrative and discussion purposes only.
*Refers to collaboration with a diverse set of investment teams within Franklin Templeton.
Sustainable Investing
Environmental, social and governance (ESG)*
Our proprietary ESG scoring system, the Templeton Global Macro ESG Index (TGM-ESGI) was introduced in 2018 and represents the culmination of decades of sovereign research and the formalization of our long-held approaches to mapping the inner complexities of countries in terms of social structure, strength/quality of governance and management of environmental challenges. Our TGM-ESGI emphasizes projected momentum, or change in score, as the measure that truly matters for both investment performance and for where capital can be deployed to generate the most positive impact.
We assign countries a current and projected score on 14 indicators that we believe have the most economic and valuation impact (scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest).
Integral to our country macroeconomic research process
The TGM-ESGI is an aggregate metric comparable to macroeconomic indicators
- Transparent—uses a wide range of qualitative indicators produced by international institutions and non-governmental organizations (e.g. World Bank, United Nations, Yale)
- Comprehensive—enables comparison across a broad investment universe of developed and emerging countries
- Measurable—a systematic measurement of ESG factors score is attributable to each country and monitored by our analyst team
- Forward-looking—ESG risk projections are calculated by our team of country macro–economists
- Embedded—in-depth macroeconomic research and ESG considerations are an inseparable part of our country risk assessment
*Templeton Global Macro has certain environmental, social and governance (ESG) capabilities; however, not all of Templeton Global Macro strategies are managed to “ESG” oriented objectives or utilize these capabilities. Integrating ESG considerations into the investment process is not a guarantee that better performance will be achieved.
Indicators that we believe would have the most economic and valuation impact
Summary of index components
Risk management
Risk management is incorporated into every stage of the investment process as we seek to isolate only the desired risk exposures. Our portfolio managers and quantitative analysts collaborate with dedicated risk analysts at Franklin Templeton to monitor the level and sources of risk in each portfolio.
Integrated
- Begins with the portfolio management team’s research process and the assessment of market and active risk
- Is supported by integrated risk analytics for the portfolio management team’s use
Independent
- Is strengthened by an independent team of risk specialists reporting to the CFO—independent of any portfolio management team
- Serves multiple stakeholders including investors, portfolio managers, fund boards and regulators
Insightful
- Is powered by actionable insights from our risk consultants and analysts located around the globe
- Combines a mosaic of analytics, oversight protocols and collaborative consultation with portfolio managers