I purchased Nate Silver's The signal and the noise a few months ago, and it's been patiently waiting for me to crack its cover. Well, I finally did, and I am very much enjoying it, as I suspected I would (it was reviewed last year in the WSJ).I will no doubt turn to...
Performance Perspectives Blog
Thoughts on performance measurement from David Spaulding and other members of our team.

The art of predicting

Two ways to form a balanced portfolio
One of our verification clients has the following situation, which I think is interesting. They have a client who has their money invested in three classes: equities, bonds, and real estate. Because the firm wishes to utilize carve-outs, they've constructed three...

Changes… the 2013 CIPM Expert Curriculum
This blog post summarizes the changes at the Expert Level of the "New CIPM Program."Expert LevelLast year, the topic area weights were broken into three broad areas:Ethics and Professional Standards (15%)Performance Evaluation (50%)GIPS (35%)Ethics is still given...

A donation to ALSF
Last year, TSG announced its intention to contribute a portion of the sale of (1) a book that was missing part of the reference section (Handbook of Investment Performance Measurement, 2nd edition), which we offer at a huge discount (turning lemons into...

We don’t need to comply with GIPS to win institutional business!
We thought the industry pretty much agreed that compliance with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®) was a virtual requirement for asset managers targeting the institutional market, especially in the States, but we’ve recently encountered a couple firms...

Harvard students caught cheating
By now, you've probably heard about the group of Harvard University students who were caught cheating on a take-home exam. When you learn the details, I think you have to wonder about the supposed higher intelligence of Harvard students, but that's a different...

“Be careful out there …”
You may be old enough to recall the TV show, Hill Street Blues, where the sergeant would, at the start of each shift, tell the police officers to "be careful out there." Well, we need it said to us, too!I got an email this week with the following:I've annotated...

Spinning with GIPS, and performance in general
The concept of "spinning" is often associated with politics and the news: that is, how one spins a story, so as to alter its appearance or focus. Spinning thus is often seen in a negative light, as it may appear to be a trick to present something differently to better...

A “work around” for portability
I had a discussion this week with a firm that is thinking of bringing someone on. That person meets two of the three criteria for GIPS(R) (Global Investment Performance Standards) portability:Substantially all the decision makers are coming alongWill...

Dealing with the underfunding of pension funds
I recently interviewed Phil Page of Cardano for The Journal of Performance Measurement(r), regarding the all-too-common situation that many (most?) pension funds, both private and public, are facing: underfunding. Phil identified three possible solutions:1) increase...