A stronger portfolio foundation with quantitative investing

Building resilience starts with the core

Core holdings anchor portfolio performance, making their diversification, adaptability and risk management essential to long-term investment outcomes.

A resilient portfolio core should seek three key benefits:

• Broad diversification: Reduce reliance on individual securities, sectors and styles, while considering how complementary investment processes work together.
• Adaptable return drivers: Capture opportunities across changing market conditions without depending on a single investment factor or market theme.
• Disciplined risk management: Manage concentration and downside risks to support long-term compounding.

A stronger foundation with quant

Modern quantitative strategies offer a more adaptive and innovative approach to portfolio construction. By continuously evaluating new information, identifying emerging opportunities, and dynamically adjusting portfolio exposures, these strategies can respond to evolving market conditions without becoming overly reliant on investment styles or factors that may fall out of favour.

These techniques complement established investment factors such as Value, Growth, and Quality rather than replace them. The objective is to translate more information into useful stock-selection insights, with experienced portfolio managers overseeing how those insights enter the portfolio.

For advisors, the opportunity is to build a resilient portfolio core, combining diversified alpha sources with disciplined risk management to help navigate evolving market regimes.

The GQE team advantage: Combining quantitative intelligence with human insight

The GQE team employs a bottom-up approach designed to pursue alpha while managing portfolio risks. Its core and disciplined philosophy come through in four strengths:

Diversified sources of alpha evaluates securities using proprietary signals across four super factors: Value (earnings and cash-flow valuations), Growth (analyst revisions and earnings forecasts), Quality (operating efficiency and capital allocation), and Informed Investor (short interest and options activity). Rather than applying the same factor weights to every stock, the GQE team tailors its models to each company's characteristics, supporting a diversified, style-balanced core investment approach.

Daily insights translated into action integrates research, portfolio management and trading within a single team, enabling a seamless transition from insights to investment decisions. Models run twice daily, with daily trading and rebalancing allowing the team to respond quickly to changing return expectations, risks and transaction costs.

Disciplined portfolio construction combines alpha forecast, with proprietary risk models and transaction cost forecasts to optimize portfolio construction. The process balances expected returns against trading costs and risk constraints, including country, sector, company size and market exposure. Liquidity and capacity considerations further support efficient execution, ensuring investment insights are translated into well-diversified, risk-conscious portfolios.

Human oversight: Portfolio managers complement quantitative models with investment expertise, reviewing trades, monitoring risks and emerging alpha opportunities. Their judgment allows the team to respond to exceptional events and market dislocations that models may not fully capture. This combination of technology and human insight supports a disciplined, repeatable process that adapts to changing market conditions while maintaining a consistent investment approach.

Putting the quant core to work: MGQE and MBQG

Mackenzie offers two complementary ETFs designed to help advisors build a stronger portfolio foundation: MGQE, providing actively managed global equity exposure, and MBQG, offering a diversified 60/40 balanced solution. Both leverage GQE's quantitative expertise to support long-term growth, diversification and disciplined risk management.

Mackenzie GQE Global Equity ETF (MGQE)

MGQE offers a differentiated approach to core global equity investing, combining the GQE team's sophisticated quantitative models with disciplined portfolio construction. Its dynamic, style-agnostic process identifies opportunities across developed markets, seeking to generate long-term alpha while managing concentration and unintended portfolio risks.

Although the ETF launched in December 2025, its investment strategy has a longer history through the Mackenzie GQE Global Equity Fund, which has been managed by the GQE team since November 2020.

Why MGQE for the core?

MGQE provides broad global equity exposure with diversified sources of alpha. Its systematic, data-driven approach seeks to complement traditional fundamental strategies, adding diversification at the investment-process level while maintaining a core equity allocation.

Mackenzie GQE Global Balanced ETF (MBQG)

MBQG brings together global equity growth and diversified fixed-income exposure in a single, balanced solution. With a strategic allocation of 60% equities and 40% fixed income, the ETF combines four complementary Mackenzie strategies:

• MGQE – Mackenzie GQE Global Equity ETF: Actively managed global equities leveraging GQE's quantitative investment expertise.
• MGB – Mackenzie Core Plus Global Fixed Income ETF: A diversified global bond allocation providing a flexible fixed-income foundation.
• MHYB – Mackenzie Global High Yield Fixed Income ETF: Exposure to global high-yield credit, offering additional income potential.
• QEBL – Mackenzie Emerging Markets Local Currency Bond Index ETF: Emerging-market local-currency bonds, broadening geographic diversification and sources of fixed-income returns.

Why MBQG for the core?

By combining the GQE team's active global equity strategy with diversified global, high-yield and emerging market bonds, MBQG aims to provide multiple sources of return and income within a single solution. Its balanced structure seeks to moderate overall portfolio volatility while maintaining exposure to long-term growth opportunities.

Building a stronger portfolio core with GQE

A strong portfolio core should support long-term growth without relying on any single investment style, sector or market trend. That takes more than diversification — it requires an investment approach that evolves with the markets.

The GQE team’s dynamic, style-agnostic approach combines diversified sources of alpha, continuous opportunity evaluation and disciplined risk management to adapt across market cycles while maintaining a consistent investment mandate.

For advisors, MGQE offers a differentiated global equity core, while MBQG combines the GQE team’s quantitative expertise with diversified fixed income in a balanced 60/40 portfolio.

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