Credit crunch fatigue is probably setting in for many people, but I am sure that even they have some venom left for those individuals who presided over the whole debacle and yet walked away with milli

Asset managers and Custodians have a real problem valuing illiquid assets in their portfolios even though many of these assets are perfectly sound and the asset manager has no intention of selling the

Time changes everything. What was once state of the art becomes a cumbersome nuisance at some point. The explosion of activity that occurred in the 90’s when hundreds of small software companies built

When deciding to outsource or host software solutions with vendors it pays to know how they intend to deliver such a service. Software vendors write software, what makes them capable of hosting that s

It is now 20 years since the publication in the Financial Analysts Journal of the “Determinants of portfolio performance” by Brinson, Hood and Beebower, and together with “Measuring non-US equity port

The Financial crisis has focused investment firms more than ever on the need to better monitor and manage risk. The conveyor-belt of ever more complex investment products has slowed and firms face inc

“Computer says no!” is how I felt when told of the decision of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a subsidiary of Riskmetrics, to declare that all our Non-Executive Directors (NED) were not “in

Any discussion on risk-adjusted performance measures must start with the grandfather of all risk measures the Sharpe Ratio or Reward to Variability which divides the excess return of a portfolio in ex

Software costs money. This cost is pretty visible, you get an invoice from your software vendor depending on the model; one off license costs, annual support agreements, annual subscriptions, upgrades

People form habits and after a while they tend to lose focus on why they do things. They do them because they do them. Asset managers do performance measurement so they buy performance measurement. Th

In one sense there ought not to be too much discussion about the relative merits of money-weighted or time-weighted attribution, the attribution methodology must be consistent with the methodology use