Wealth Reporting and Performance Analytics
Reporting answers what happened. Analytics answers why and what to do next. Most family offices ship the first and skimp on the second.
Key takeaways
- —Attribution analysis explains who and what drove the period's returns.
- —Factor exposure shows what the portfolio actually owns vs what it claims to own.
- —Manager contribution highlights value added net of fees, not just gross.
- —Analytics should drive the investment-committee conversation, not decorate it.
A typical wealth report shows total return, asset-class breakdown, and a few benchmark comparisons. That is the floor, not the ceiling. Performance analytics — return attribution, factor decomposition, manager-versus-benchmark contribution net of fees — turns the same data into something decision-useful. It shows which managers are earning their fees, which factor exposures are doing the heavy lifting, and where the portfolio is over- or under-positioned versus the IPS.
The right cadence for analytics is quarterly for the investment committee and annually for the family council. Monthly is too noisy; the analytics work is wasted on stochastic short-term variance. The discipline is to use the analytics to drive the conversation rather than to decorate it. When a manager underperforms, the attribution shows whether it is positioning, factor, or skill. The committee's response is sharper as a result.
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