Arbroath Group
Macroeconomic and Geopolitical
Strategy and Insight
Arbroath Group
Macroeconomic and Geopolitical
Strategy and Insight
Concrete and Actionable
The Signal in the Noise
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Arbroath Group analyzes broad geopolitical and macroeconomic dynamics
to distill and target
high-value, critically relevant recommendations that address client priorities
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
Against a backdrop of generational geopolitical upheaval and turmoil, we are continuously reassessing where current market opportunities may fail and where current market failures may soon offer opportunity.
The Macroeconomic Challenge
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Macroeconomic Challenge
With deep experience in US and international politics, economics and financial markets, we deliver specific client-centered insights that are concrete and actionable.
Arbroath Group Services
Global Financial Markets
Managing partner Christopher Smart brings deep experience in global financial markets drawn from both top quintile portfolio investment management expertise as well as senior US Treasury and White House policymaking experience. This nuanced understanding of sensitive political considerations enables the Arbroath Group to offer clients a particularly rich range of value-add strategies.
Strategic Advisory
Our expertise and networks globally provide us with the formal and informal intelligence and data to advise our clients through a broad array of strategic planning and consulting services.
Geopolitical
With unique expertise in Russia, Europe and Asia, we offer geopolitical and geoeconomic risk assessments and roadmap development, legislative and trade-related analysis, and tailored crisis and scenario planning.
Christopher Smart
Managing Partner
Christopher Smart is the founder and managing partner of the Arbroath Group. His distinguished career in global financial markets and government service helps drive the Group’s work to distill and spotlight high-value macroeconomic and geopolitical insights, trends and strategy in a bespoke services business model.
Christopher is an a
Christopher Smart is the founder and managing partner of the Arbroath Group. His distinguished career in global financial markets and government service helps drive the Group’s work to distill and spotlight high-value macroeconomic and geopolitical insights, trends and strategy in a bespoke services business model.
Christopher is an accomplished investment industry leader, with demonstrated success in portfolio management and investment strategy, complemented by senior economic policy roles at the U.S. Treasury and the White House.
Prior to founding the Arbroath Group, Christopher was the Chief Global Strategist at Barings, where he also founded, built and led the Barings Investment Institute. The Institute focused on the investment opportunities shaped by macroeconomic and political dynamics and explored the forces driving long-term capital allocation decisions.
From 2013 to 2015, he served in the White House as Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic Council and the National Security Council, where he was principal advisor on trade, investment and global economic issues. Christopher also spent four years as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, where he led the response to the European financial crisis and led U.S. engagement on financial policy across Europe, Russia and Central Asia.
Christopher has also served as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, and at the Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs where he explored issues at the intersection of financial markets, international relations and national security.
Prior to his government service, he worked as the Director of International Investments at Pioneer Investments where he managed top-performing Emerging Markets and International portfolios.
Early in his career, he was an advisor to the Russian Finance Ministry following the collapse of the Soviet Union and a journalist in Florida and France.
Christopher's public profile includes regular columns on global markets and international relations that he writes for Barron’s, Bloomberg Opinion and Foreign Policy, and he is also a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg News and other major media.
Christopher holds a B.A. in History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University. Fluent in French and Russian, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
Contact us
Questions or Comments?
Reactions to Leading Thoughts or other published content from the Arbroath Group are always invited.
Arbroath Group
Declaration of Arbroath
Strategic investment advice must be thoughtful, informed and above all independent. We take our name from the Declaration of Arbroath, signed by Scottish barons in this coastal town northeast of Edinburgh in 1320 to declare independence from England.