Our aim is always to maintain a thorough understanding of the multi asset marketplace and any developments that take place within it. This forms the context for all our research.
Our main research platform is Scopic Prism, our unique and proprietary database that enables us to filter, search, and organise thousands of ‘pages’ of our own qualitative-based research text as well as data and portfolio DNA covering the portfolios of tens of multi asset managers. The information on Scopic Prism has been collated during more than a decade of regular interviews with multi asset portfolio managers – both existing and new.
All the multi asset managers we research must agree to annual meetings (at a minimum) and to complete quarterly monitoring workbooks.
Investment groups, portfolio managers and their portfolios, must all meet our quality criteria before we can include portfolios within our DNA reports:
We ask multi asset portfolio managers to complete over 100 fields of information in a proprietary workbook. This gives us a broad understanding of the proposition, the combination of investment outcomes it seeks to achieve, its asset allocation and tactical parameters, and what it will and won’t invest in. This enables us to prepare a bespoke agenda and questioning in advance of interviewing the investment team.
Initial investment team interviews enable us to verify the accuracy of the entries in our proprietary workbook. However, just as importantly it enables us to better understand:
Analysing this qualitative information then enables us to build in-depth research notes in draft form. The aim of these research notes is to:
During the analysis process and before we conclude our draft research notes, we look to confirm whether the portfolio’s ‘investment journey’ matches what we might expect to see given its embedded biases. We do this by analysing risk adjusted performance characteristics between a series of key inflection points in financial market returns.
Our draft research notes are sent to the portfolio manager ahead of a follow up interview. This enables us to:
All our research is uploaded to Scopic Prism, our multi-asset database. The database then feeds the information required for the DNA reports that are made available via our website.
Our website is regularly updated and is designed for intermediaries to navigate towards those multi asset portfolios that exhibit the DNA characteristics most likely to suit individual client needs.
Our draft research notes are reviewed, our opinion overlaid, DNA and suitability factors inserted, and a report is produced that covers the following topics:
We look to identify inconsistencies in a portfolio’s pattern of performance versus what we might expect to see under different market conditions. We do this by continuing to monitor a portfolio’s risk adjusted returns between key market inflection points. We are then able to challenge investment teams when and if these occasions arise.
What is less easy to identify, are changes to underlying qualitative factors that might lead us to anticipate that a portfolio might perform differently in the future when compared to its history. To help us get ahead of the curve, we send every multi asset investment team a quarterly monitoring workbook to complete. This helps us to identify these changes as they occur – and sometimes in advance. The workbooks also provide us with a means to query unexpected patterns of performance.