Performance measurement/analysis/attribution

Water Cooler Careers
#1

Anyone who was or is doing this kind of work here?

What technical skills are required?

#2

I assume good excel skills and programmatic type thinking would be very useful in that sort of role

#3

olap cubes

#4

“programmatic type thinking”.

What programming language or tool I should learn?

#5

VBA is always useful when dealing with excell

python is a good language to know

#6

for performance analysis, you just need pivot table and moderate level of excel knowledge.

#7

^ but that won’t get me an offer right? Everybody knows Pivot Table and has moderate level of excel knowledge.

#8

not sure. Study the section on Performance Attribution in level 3 and ace the interview. Say you have experience doing this reporting directly to PMs etc.

#9

I work in investment consulting. Co-built an attribution model for our firm. Just need to be good with Excel, quantitatively comfortable (able to explain the formulae), and creatively minded (building a useable interface etc.). Also helps to know your way around economic data (able to use Bloomberg or FactSet etc.) as you will likely need to automate gathering of currency information etc. Languages used were VBA and SQL.

#10

Performance and attribution calculation capability can be purchased with software licenses within Bloomberg, FactSet, MSCI Aegis, etc. Although they have trouble handling futures within portfolios.

I think that it would be important to know the fundamentals of the calcuations so you can sniff out if something is wrong with the software output. So know the CFA material on that stuff very well. Technical skills would include being tech savy to be able learn the product interfaces quickly and be able to manipulate data within Excel and then present it in a professional manner.

#11

There are really two types of companies for performance and attribution jobs:

  1. Custodian Banks - these guys maintain accounting data for external clients, such as asset managers and insitutional investors, and as a value add they’ll provide performance, attribution, reporting, etc. The performance attribution team will probably come up from the fund accounting team and largely fall under the operations department. These guys tend to have an internal accounting system that feeds into third party attribution software and then feed into another internal system for web-based reporting and standardized reporting. The job itself should be scrubbing data, following-up with incorrect data, explaining output to stakeholders, and trouble-shooting.

  2. Asset Managers - the performance and attribution guys tend to either come from the internal operations team or custodian banks. Since these guys don’t maintain the underlying data, the job will be more focused on quality control and include responsibilities such as maintaining GIPS composites, working with compliance, working with the RFP team, client reporting. These guys will have third party attribution and reporting systems as well. As with the custodian bank job, explaining the results of attribution will be a large part of the job.

Keys to get jobs are (1) related work experience, (2) attention to detail, (3) experience with performance/attribution/data systems FactSet, Eagle Pace, Morningstar, etc.

Note - I never worked as a performance analyst, but I worked with them. There is also careers in third party GIPS verification firms but tend to be more senior folks.