Insights

Perspectives on the Future of Investment Management

Thought leadership from practitioners who are building the infrastructure for the next generation of asset and wealth managers.

Fixed income·September 2026·10 min

Half of This Trade Is Built to Last

As policy expectations turned hawkish this summer, money moved through the bond market, and it did not move the way the story is usually told. The rotation is normally described as money leaving duration for the front end. Include the middle of the curve, which is the largest part of the market and is usually left out, and medium-dated funds took +$138bn over six months against +$120bn into short-dated. The bid broadened rather than shortened; only the very long end went begging, and that is fifty funds and about $10bn. The move away from risk happened on a different axis, by who you lend to rather than for how long. And the two legs have very different shelf lives: around nine tenths of the movement in corporate debt tracks the news, against under a fifth of the movement in government debt. One is a sentiment position that will leave the way it arrived. The other is cash matching liabilities. Most commentary treats them as one trade.

Priced versus realized·August 2026·10 min

All of the Risk, None of the Premium

Almost every private strategy is impossible to study, because nothing liquid holds the same thing. One is the exception: the fee income and carried interest a stakes fund buys a minority claim on is also what listed asset managers report as earnings, so the same economics are appraised quarterly in a fund and priced every morning on an exchange. Over 43 months the liquid twin returned 21.5 per cent. The index returned 22.2 per cent over exactly the same window, at 13.8 per cent volatility against the twin's 30.6, and a 9.8 per cent drawdown against 36.5. The extra risk earned nothing. The quarterly appraisals show nothing resembling that ride, and the reporting calendar does not explain it: observe the identical series only four times a year and you still see a 30.8 per cent fall, so looking less often hides 5.7 points of a 36.5 point drop and no more. Nor was there ever a diversifier here to break. While the bond hedge moved from -0.44 to +0.54 after March 2022, these economics sat between 0.65 and 0.78 against equities in every window with enough data, and the highest reading is the crisis.

Portfolio analytics·August 2026·9 min

A 60/40 Portfolio Is Not One Strategy

Five funds all currently sold as balanced, moderate or tactical hold between 13.8 and 66.3 per cent in equities, and two of them carry the identical category tag while sitting 18.5 points apart. One reports a cash position of minus 21.5 per cent, which is borrowing the fund's name gives no hint of. Hold the split at exactly 60/40 by weight and the portfolios still diverge by 146 basis points of return and 280 of volatility, with the effective number of independent bets running from 1.18 to 4.17. Then change nothing in the portfolio at all: priced on six houses' published capital market assumptions, the same 60/40 moves 99 basis points, and the houses differ by nearly three times on what the equity leg earns over the bond leg. One of them publishes two correct expected returns for the same asset, 124 basis points apart, which is larger than the disagreement between all six. The label names a weight. It does not name a portfolio, and it does not name a return.

Institutional report·August 2026·11 min

The Rail Is the Product: Tokenised Cash Funds and What the Checking Is Worth

A tokenised cash fund holds the same Treasury bills you already own, settles on a rail that runs continuously, and costs a little more. Whether to switch is very hard to answer honestly, because the two sides answer to different disclosure regimes: one publishes a standardised thirty-day yield, the other a seven-day sponsor rate; one a total expense ratio, the other a subsidised management fee with custody outside it. None of it is concealed. Our view is to change the question. This is a liquidity operations instrument, not a yield instrument, and it belongs in the treasury and collateral sleeve budgeted against settlement risk. The segment is $16.19bn across 87 products, roughly double a year ago, and one incumbent fund is still more than six times that. The premium is not a number: depending which two funds you compare it runs from nothing to more than forty basis points, and all the answers are defensible. Three on-chain funds resolve in our own data, each named like a share class of an existing fund and recorded as a wholly new one, and one ticker widely quoted for a tokenised Treasury fund resolves to an unrelated listed bond fund at $2.49bn.

Institutional report·August 2026·9 min

Off the Shelf: What to Establish Before You Compare a Listed Product

A fortnight ago we published seven steps for choosing a structured product and called step two, screening the listed shelf, a gate that shortens everything after it. An adviser then asked whether to buy a newly launched gold income fund or build the same exposure more cheaply, and running our own process on a real product turned that conclusion around. The long exposure is assembled from two options on Treasury collateral rather than held. Three yields are published for the same fund, 15.8 per cent, 14.79 per cent and 2.85 per cent, and only the last one measures income, so an adviser sizing a replication to the headline is underwriting to a number the fund does not earn. And the fee premium over plain equity beta is about 45 basis points compared like for like, or about 24 if the wrapper types are mixed, which is the most natural comparison anyone would run. None of it is concealed. Every figure is published. Step two is not a gate that shortens the work; it is where the work moved to.

Flow research·August 2026·10 min

The Only Thing That Rotated Was the Narrative

The rotation described all summer does not appear in the flow record. US government bond funds took in $14.0bn across the six weeks to 10 August, an inflow in every single week, and every maturity bucket was positive including the longest. The story came from a normalised score that dipped negative in three of those weeks, and that score measures how quickly money arrives, not which way it is going. We made the same error in our own first pass. The adviser panel agrees with the money, the gold buying is real but a fortnight old in the US and steady only in Europe, and the standard stress library holds three scenarios, all of them growth or rate shocks, with one provider in seven publishing a gold assumption you could size a hedge with.

Institutional report·August 2026·10 min

Choosing a Structured Product: Shapes, Wrappers, and a Seven-Step Selection Process

Structured-product selection is two decisions, not one: the payoff shape the client wants, and the wrapper it is held in. The two are routinely collapsed into a single product recommendation. Six shapes account for effectively the whole market, and in four of them the investor is the seller of optionality, so the coupon is premium received for a risk assumed rather than yield earned. The listed alternative is $290.0bn across 347 US funds, concentrated in two shapes and thin in three, which tells a selector before any analysis whether the shelf can help or whether the conversation is bespoke. Includes the seven-step process applied to any replication request, and a worked example of pricing issuer credit from the issuer's own traded curve.

Intelligence·August 2026·12 min

Art Is Twice as Risky as Your Report Says

Consolidate a family's art at the valuation on file and the measured risk of the household falls. It did so in 27 of 27 configurations we tested, which is the tell. The reported volatility is 9.8%; correcting for appraisal smoothing gives 19.6% and an independently unsmoothed series gives 21.3%, two unrelated methods landing within 1.7 points of each other. Feed a model the reported number and it wants 22.4% of household wealth in art; feed it the corrected one and it wants nothing. Here is the input set to use instead, how much the portfolio can carry, and why a report saying 41.0% illiquid is really 57.5%.

Intelligence·July 2026·10 min

There Is No Such Thing as a Gold Allocation

Gold is near a record high and investors pulled $5.41 billion out of precious-metals funds in 2026. Both are true. Split the same universe by instrument and the contradiction resolves: physical vehicles took in $1.67bn while miner equity lost $7.08bn, and the miner trade ran a full round trip that unwound $13.33bn across five months. Strip the news out of Western flows and the structural component is negative, and has been for nine years. The buyer setting the price does not appear in the data at all.

Intelligence·July 2026·11 min

Diversification Did Not Disappear. It Moved.

Two of the three assets a portfolio holds for protection have stopped providing it. Equities against long Treasuries sit at +0.15, the 97th percentile of twenty years, against a QE-era average of −0.41. Gold is at an eleven-year high against equities, and its excellent 2026 is the reason rather than a coincidence. The one asset genuinely diversifying is at the 1st percentile and almost nobody owns it. The uncomfortable part is that the capital market assumptions have already re-based to all this, and the portfolios built on them have not.

Intelligence·July 2026·9 min

Indirect Is Not Diversified

There are two kinds of AI infrastructure, and only one of them diversifies anything. 65% of family offices say AI is a priority while more than 70% hold no infrastructure at all, so moving down the stack into power, cooling and data centres is a sound answer. It removes the risk of backing the wrong winner. It does not remove the risk that there is less to win: under a hyperscaler capital expenditure pullback the tilted portfolio loses to the baseline by 318 basis points, and the standard six-scenario stress test never shocks a single asset the tilt bought.

Intelligence·July 2026·8 min

The AI Trade Hidden in Your Portfolio

You do not have to believe AI is a bubble to have a problem. You only have to look at what you already own. The ten largest positions in the S&P 500 are 37% of the index and every one is the AI trade; the same names top the 'total market' and 'global' funds. The median US wealth manager holds ~16% in tech and under 1% in energy, ten 'different' funds hold the same ten names at a 0.70 correlation, and the 'safe' bond sleeve is priced for the same world. When a crowded trade reprices, the labels stop mattering and it moves together.

Intelligence·July 2026·6 min

Which China Are You Buying?

China is not one investment. Mainland A-shares returned +9.0% while offshore MSCI China returned -6.2% in the same 13 weeks, a 15-point gap that runs on the vehicle you own, not the sectors you picked. European institutions built a structural EM overweight through 2024 then cooled, their China-specific buying is a contrarian signal, and EM sovereign spreads near a 15-year low at 181bps confirm a thin cushion. Which China you own is the question a single 'China' line obscures.

Distribution Intelligence·June 2026·8 min

Said vs Solved.

Where allocators are heading, and where the math says they should. More than a third of advisors are reading the same fixed-income script. Set against a consensus of eight capital-market-assumption providers, the loudest trades carry the weakest math: private equity reads 0.53 while direct lending reads near 1.0. The gap between said and solved is the least-competed pipeline a distribution team will find all year.

Private Markets·June 2026·8 min

The SpaceX IPO and the Tyranny of the Average.

SpaceX just became the biggest IPO in history, at roughly $1.77 trillion. Across 3,700 funds in our database, venture's average net return is 13.4% and its median is 0.2%, the same funds. What the power law, the vintage cycle and the lock-up clock say about buying the listing, and why the edge for a buyer today is discipline, not the asset.

Portfolio Analytics·June 2026·7 min

A Factor Weight Is Not a Risk Budget.

A formal risk model says interest rates are 2% of a family office portfolio's risk. A rate shock takes 14% off it. The gap lives in the valuation channels the model cannot see, and five targeted moves close it for eight basis points of return.

Portfolio Analytics·June 2026·7 min

Diversified on Paper. One Bet in Practice.

A typical growth family office portfolio was 98% a single equity-factor bet, with almost no inflation protection. An energy shock exposed it. Re-diversifying the risk budget wins in five of six stress scenarios, and gives up no risk-adjusted return on long-run assumptions.

Flow Research·June 2026·7 min

Watch the Money, Not the Memo.

Where public and private capital is actually moving in 2026, region by region. US buyers put $1.04tn into US equity; Europe put €10bn into US and €198bn into EM. Same memo, opposite money, and the gap is where the next mandate is.

Allocator Research·June 2026·8 min

Five Trends Every Allocator Can Name. Five Gaps Almost None Have Closed.

What 515 institutions and $29.9 trillion are doing underneath the headlines. Each well-known trend hides a gap between the portfolio allocators describe and the one they actually hold, closing at a different speed in every region.

Insight·January 2025·4 min

Bridging Technology and Strategy in Asset Management

In today's complex financial landscape, asset and wealth managers face mounting pressure to optimise costs, generate revenue, and deliver innovative solutions.

Insight·January 2025·4 min

Institutional Growth Through Product Extensions

How small-cap value managers can overcome capacity constraints through innovative distribution strategies and portfolio customisation technology.

Insight·January 2025·4 min

Scaling Innovation with Traditional Asset Managers

Delivering tailored solutions that allow traditional managers to focus on core competencies while we handle portfolio construction and execution complexities.

Insight·January 2025·4 min

Transforming Investment Strategies

Staying competitive requires balancing innovation and efficiency. How to bridge the gap between cutting-edge investment technology and strategic business objectives.