The Spaulding Group's December newsletter deals with the use of spreadsheets, and their all too frequent use as "systems." I point out, as I've done countless times elsewhere, that they are:time-consumingerror pronecumbersomenot databasesand so should be avoided,...

When I teach our fundamentals of performance or attribution classes, I often mention how we adopt ideas from other segments of society. Measuring performance, for example, is found in many areas, with sports perhaps being the most thorough (with baseball leading the...

Almost every day I receive questions from clients and others about various aspects of performance and risk. And for the most part I am able to respond, either with my opinion or an answer based on fact.What occurred yesterday in Newtown, CT leaves me, and no doubt...

At this month's Fall (Autumn) Performance Measurement Forum meeting, which was held in one of my favorite cities (San Francisco), one member posed a question about ancillary systems (i.e., those systems that sit aside the packaged or programmed systems that most asset...

Jason Zweig often provides inspiration for a blog post, and his article in this past weekend's WSJ ("Are You Brilliant, or Lucky?") has done just that. The subject of luck versus skill has been one that academics, as well as practitioners, have wrestled with for...

The long-awaited third edition of the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS(R)) Handbook is now available. This book is a companion whenever I do a verification. I find it to be an invaluable compendium to the Standards, and a valuable resource that helps...

In last Friday's WSJ, Cameron McWhirter had an article titled "To Quote Thomas Jefferson, 'I Never Actually Said That,'" in which he refutes many quotes that are incorrectly attributed to our America's third President (and one of our Founding Fathers, author of the...

Today's post was inspired by an op-ed piece in this weekend's WSJ: "Madoff Got Away, But Netflix Won't," by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Jenkins discusses how Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' Facebook post that the company's "customers had streamed a billion hours of video in the...

Many software vendors and custodians claim to offer the Karnosky-Singer multi-currency attribution model, but do they really?The name has become synonymous with a robust approach to identifying the contributions from currency movements on a portfolio's excess...

One of the daily alerts I subscribe to is the "word of the day," from dictionary.com. Many of the words are quite fascinating, and today's struck me as one that was worthy of being highlighted in a post. Chances are you've already guessed what the word is.erinaceous...