Last week I began to conduct a software certification for a TSG software vendor client. My primary contact mentioned that they changed their policy for timing of cash flows, so that inflows default to start-of-day events, while outflows default to end-of-day (though...

True Confession Time: years ago, when the concept of "supplemental information" was being introduced, I opposed the idea of actually "labeling" this information. While understanding the notion of supplemental is important, I didn't see much value in having to label...

TSG will host Risk Week this coming fall. It will be a week of daily webinars, covering a variety of risk topics.Risk measurement's importance to the investment industry has never been greater; thus our belief that a week of daily sessions, conducted by leading...

A TSG verification client recently sent me the following note:Hi Dave, I’m hoping you can answer a questions for us very quickly.  Our CCO and I are having a disagreement over whether representative account performance from a composite can be shown alongside the...

One area that often results in a lot of confusion (and probably some controversy) is how one should calculate performance attribution of a portfolio that includes derivatives. I have been of the opinion that if the portfolio holds anything that isn't represented in...

In their classic, A Monetary History of the United States, 1967- 1960, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz observed that FDR's bank holiday, shortly after he took office in 1933, which was supposed to have been a cure was, in reality, "worse than the disease."A...

I sometimes jokingly say that since I was once a politician, lying comes naturally to me. And we know how politicians typically rank on the scale of trustworthiness. Lawyers and used car salesmen are also among those who seem to garner little respect in the trust...

TSG announced yesterday that we now offer operational reviews. While we've actually been performing this service for 20 years, we never told anyone about it...seems odd, right? When a client would come to us and ask, "can you review our operation, to identify...

I must confess a fair amount of interest in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, aka "The God Particle." It is an amazing story, though its true meaning seems beyond the grasp of most of us mortals. I won't bother to attempt to explain what it is, since there are...

One of the topics which often results in debate is the interaction effect. Recall that in performance attribution, specifically with the "Brinson models," we have two effects: allocation and selection. Depending on how we calculate these effects we may have a third:...