Zephyr’s blog is a useful tool for the latest information on the financial industry, our software and our organization. Visit on a regular basis for a collection of best practices, valuable tips and tricks, discussions on Zephyr’s research papers and case studies and much more. Also, we invite you to comment on posts and make topic suggestions. We welcome your feedback and trust ZephyrCOVE will be a beneficial resource for you.
Predicting the weather in Boston for next week is very difficult, but you can generally bet it will hot and humid most of the summer, cold and windy much of the winter, and you should always have a contingency plan because the weather tends to not cooperate.
Predicting returns is much harder than predicting the weather, because returns can fly in the face of available logic, consensus, or, seemingly, facts. At the beginning of 2011, we all knew that the...
Did you know Zephyr Associates collects narrative information in the Zephyr Managed Accounts Database? This information comes standard with your Zephyr subscription and is available to all of our subscribers. Participating managers provide information on firm history, buy/sell discipline, portfolio construction process, and many other firm- and product-level fields.
The best pre-built template to view this information can be found in the Template Library. In StyleADVISOR, if you...
Throughout Europe important structural changes are being made to the retail investment advice industry. In the UK, this is being implemented under what the Financial Services Authority (FSA) calls the Retail Distribution Review or RDR, an initiative that will be enforced starting December 31st, 2012. The FSA’s key objective is to give consumers confidence that the advice and products they buy are best suited to their requirements. The post below will discuss...
A frequent question we receive at Zephyr is, “I’m using AllocationADVISOR, and the portfolios I entered appear above the efficient frontier. How is that even possible?”
I’d like to tell you that your portfolios have defied gravity and you’ve beaten the efficient frontier. Unfortunately, that isn’t true, or even...
Over the last year or so there has been a lot of buzz around the idea known as “Active Share”. Proposed by Cremers and Petajisto, simply put Active Share is a way to measure the degree of deviation from a passive benchmark from a holdings-based perspective. Traditionally the most common way people measure the degree of active management is to use...
Although a relatively new development, the idea of Target Date, Lifecycle, or Glide-Path mutual funds has found a willing and enthusiastic audience in the defined contribution world. While the idea of offering plan participants a well-diversified investment appropriate to their goals and needs via a single investment is certainly appealing, the growth of this type of product has been a challenge for those attempting to independent, objective performance analysis.
The...
The good news is Zephyr has updated our popular “Market Cycles” template and we’ve made it available for download in our Template Library. The bad news is the update was made to incorporate the recent summer swoon in the markets.
The Market Cycles template was designed to give a different perspective than the standard trailing one-year, three-year, five-year, ten-year time frames people...
