A year ago Monday, the Northeast part of the United States was greeted with a horrendous storm, which included a lot of snow and damaging wind. My wife and I that day went to a civil union ceremony, a trip that should have taken about an hour; instead, it took four....

One of our clients introduced me to alternative ways to calculate two commonly used risk-adjusted return measures: information ratio and Sharpe ratio. Their immediate derivation is from Zephyr, and I am attempting to identify their origin. I confirmed that...

I have read through the new GIPS(R) (Global Investment Performance Standards) Alternative Investments Guidance Statement a few times, and frequently make what I think are interesting discoveries. Here's just one:I have highlighted the part I find of interest (I...

If truth be told (and I am about to tell it), I do not know how common this practice is, but we have become aware of cases where GIPS(R) (Global Investment Performance Standards) verifiers require their clients to sign multi-year contracts. E.g., they will perform the...

This was just released by TSG:

The weekend WSJ often provides fodder for this blog, though this is the first that I recall it came from Peggy Noonan. Her assessment of Thursday's Vice Presidential debate ("Confusing Strength With Aggression") in this past weekend's edition was quite insightful. But...

A software vendor client of ours described a situation involving one of their clients. Until a certain date, the portfolio's return was in US Dollars (USD). After that date, it was in Japanese Yen (JPY). The question: can we link these periodic returns?My initial...

In TSG's Fundamentals of Performance and GIPS(R) Fundamentals courses, I often pose this question to attendees:Verification verifies a firm's compliance with GIPS: true or false? Simple question, right? What does it mean to be verified?Is it not intuitive that...

TSG has offered training for close to 20 years, including our one-day GIPS Fundamentals Workshop. To date we've trained over 3,500 individuals throughout the world (all over the United States, in several cities in Canada, various parts of Europe, in South...

I am conducting a "non-GIPS(R)" verification this week for a client who uses "rep" (representative) account performance for marketing purposes. This particular firm is not easily able to comply with GIPS (Global Investment Performance Standards) today, and so this...