The Arbroath Group
Macroeconomic and Geopolitical
Strategy and Insight
The Arbroath Group
Macroeconomic and Geopolitical
Strategy and Insight
Actionable and Concrete
The Signal in the Noise
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Arbroath Group analyzes broad macroeconomic and geopolitical dynamics
to distill and target
high-value, critically relevant recommendations to match client priorities
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Opportunity in Volatility
Our deep experience in US and international politics and financial markets enables us to deliver specific client-centered insights that are actionable and concrete
The Macroeconomic Challenge
The Opportunity in Volatility
The Macroeconomic Challenge
Against a backdrop of generational geopolitical upheaval and turmoil, The Arbroath Group assesses and focuses on individual client needs, risk exposure and tolerance
The Arbroath Group Services
Global Financial Markets
Led by our managing partner Christopher Smart, our deep experience in global financial markets delivers a balance of both top quintile portfolio investment management expertise in emerging, developed, and US markets as well as senior US Treasury and White House economic and financial policymaking expertise.
This nuanced understanding of sensitive political considerations enables the Arbroath Group to offer our 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 necessary to advise our clients on a broad array of strategic planning and consulting services, both at the board of director level as well as government relations and international trade operating levels.
Geopolitical
With unique expertise in Russia and Europe particularly,
the Arbroath Group serves client needs including geopolitical or
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.
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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. As Scotland's story itself suggests, the struggle to achieve true independence is long and arduous.