Bankers were allowed to over-stretch their businesses, relying on too little capital to fund lending on a prodigious scale. As they competed with each other they took less and less consideration of th

The model-T Ford gave the world a reliable car for $295 whereas its cheapest rival cost nearly $3,000; it was also better quality and more reliable than most of its competitors. That is because the ma

At StatPro we are always trying to find ways to offer our clients better value for money. We have, we believe, a first class range of products covering Performance Measurement, Equity Attribution, Fix

“Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service” was published by the Software & Information Industry’s (SIIA) eBusiness Division in February 2001.  The concept, models and technology have all had

Credit crunch fatigue is probably setting in for many people, but I am sure that even they have some venom left for those individuals who presided over the whole debacle and yet walked away with milli

Asset managers and Custodians have a real problem valuing illiquid assets in their portfolios even though many of these assets are perfectly sound and the asset manager has no intention of selling the

Time changes everything. What was once state of the art becomes a cumbersome nuisance at some point. The explosion of activity that occurred in the 90’s when hundreds of small software companies built

When deciding to outsource or host software solutions with vendors it pays to know how they intend to deliver such a service. Software vendors write software, what makes them capable of hosting that s

It is now 20 years since the publication in the Financial Analysts Journal of the “Determinants of portfolio performance” by Brinson, Hood and Beebower, and together with “Measuring non-US equity port

The Financial crisis has focused investment firms more than ever on the need to better monitor and manage risk. The conveyor-belt of ever more complex investment products has slowed and firms face inc

“Computer says no!” is how I felt when told of the decision of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a subsidiary of Riskmetrics, to declare that all our Non-Executive Directors (NED) were not “in

Any discussion on risk-adjusted performance measures must start with the grandfather of all risk measures the Sharpe Ratio or Reward to Variability which divides the excess return of a portfolio in ex