Think before you act. This phrase, often repeated in all walks of life, rings particularly true in the finance industry and, especially, in performance measurement.

Like most monetary professionals, performance measurers have to answer to someone and when those answers mean millions of pounds then it is even more crucial to be mindful...

In another tale of life after PM, GEOFF CHASSEUR recounts the ongoing journey of Anthony Stevens, a man of science who, having left PM, returned to the fold. But in the laboratory at home there resides a bubbling cauldron of the noblest of elixirs.

In today’s stricter regulatory and litigious financial environment, it is necessary for the private client trustee to effectively monitor investments and managers. How is this accomplished? Nicola Le Brocq of SG Hambros Private Client Trust Group explains.

If you can streamline the delivery of index data to the performance team you will improve data quality, reduce the time to market and the burden of data management, says Stephen O’Brien of RIMES. Ultimately this will minimise the stress on the performance team so that they can forget about the benchmark data and enable them to concentrate more time on the value-add tasks and the investment process

STEVE SOBHI of Ashland Partners is normally bringing firms into this compliant world of GIPS but in his downtime he escapes to the picturesque vineyards on America’s West Coast.

Cries for better attribution have not always led to the development of a superior and more focused performance team. It is the bridging of intelligent planning with the sponsorship of change that will be the platform for creating the best performance function possible, says TREVOR PERSAUD of Prudential Singapore.

There is no doubt portfolio managers have investment skill, however, superior performance is often not attained because of a series of predictable behavioural shortcomings. According to MALCOLM SMITH of Inalytics, there is a way to neutralise these behavioural biases that make managers prone to mediocre performance

While accuracy of pricing is absolutely vital for calculating a portfolio’s performance, it is much less important for calculating attribution. Many investment institutions are spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort in putting more accuracy into attribution analysis than it really merits. Is yours one of them? ANDREW COLIN of Flametree Research explains

CARL BACON and Anthony Howland sit down at the PMR Roundtable to discuss Statpro’s decision to acquire Performa and the ramifications this merger is likely to have on the performance industry.