Today we're going to be discussing film finance. But before I discuss that, let me introduce myself. I am Jonathan Chisholm, portfolio manager within Patrick Trust, which is a single family office. We are a trust structure, not a couple of management structures. So we operate more like a pension fund than most of the sort of family offices that are out there.
So family offices are constituted as capital management structures, which allows the family office to do the broadest of financial operations even broader than most investment banks. And a trust is rather constrained. So I'm only allowed to allocate to managed investments because of that. Because of those constraints, it has allowed me to think out of the box. It has forced me to think out of the box and to anticipate how the investment thesis of the manager, whilst seemingly to be persuasive and interesting, is in fact fundamentally flawed.
No one makes the best decision at the time thinking that it's a bad idea. It's only after that the investment goes south that you think back with hindsight and realize what a bad idea it was to make that investment decision. So as it relates to family offices, I specialize in emerging managers and alternative investments. It's my focus primarily because I think that risk and reward by themselves are no way meaningfully correlated.
So not only can you have a high return with a low risk, but very often you have a low risk and a very high sort of very low return and a very high risk. So an example of that would be mortgage backed securities or even Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff was not having phenomenal performance. He just had Steady Eddy performance.
So my basic fundamental investment thesis is that risk and reward are in no way meaningfully correlated. So I look for investments that are higher in return because they're perceived to be higher risk. And I will determine whether the risk is really there or if it's a sort of paranoid fear of of risk.