06 — Guides
How firms use Quant Reports
No two clients arrive in the same condition. Some produce reports by hand and know it cannot continue; others automated part of it years ago and have been living with the half that never got finished. All of them are somewhere on the same road.
The road most firms are on
Reporting tends to mature in the same four steps, whatever kind of firm you are.
- Hand-assembled — Spreadsheets, a document template, and one person who knows how it all fits together. The real exposure is not quality — it is that the process lives in someone’s head. _(Most firms start here)_
- Part-automated — Some feeds, some templates, a lot of stitching. The automation is real but partial, so the checking never went away. _(Or here)_
- Automated — Reports build themselves each period. Adding portfolios stops being a reason to hesitate, and the team’s time moves to commentary and clients.
- Published — The same figures reach clients wherever they look — reports, your website, other systems. Reporting becomes something the firm publishes, not something it produces.
The part that matters — Nobody arrives at stage three on their own, and moving between stages is not a transformation programme you have to staff. It is our work. If you have no data team, no project manager and no appetite for a six-month implementation, that is the normal case rather than an obstacle — you are buying the outcome, not a tool and a licence to figure it out.
Two kinds of firm
Most of our clients are one of two kinds, and the reporting job is genuinely different between them.
Fund managers _(Usually arrives at stage 1 or 2)_
One strategy, or a small range, presented to several audiences at once. The factsheet is the firm’s most-read document: the numbers have to be right and the brand has to be immaculate. Reporting becomes automatic to the same design, and the fund pages on your website stop being a second manual job because they carry the same figures.
- What the reporting usually carries: Growth of an investment, Drawdown, Performance vs benchmark, Monthly return grid, Risk statistics, Peer percentiles, Top holdings, Sector & geography
Multi-asset managers _(Usually arrives at stage 2)_
Diversified portfolios, usually as a range across risk profiles. The reporting job is different in kind — it is about what the portfolio holds and why the mix moved, as much as what it returned — and it has to hold together across a range that keeps growing. One template covers the range, and a new portfolio inherits it and reports from day one.
- What the reporting usually carries: Asset allocation vs neutral, Ranges & targets, Underlying investments, Contributors & detractors, Asset class contributions, Look-through exposure, Performance vs objective, Attribution
Plenty of firms are both, and the two sit together without duplication because they draw on the same components and the same data. If you are neither — an advice firm, an asset consultant, a group running several brands — the model still holds; what differs is which components the template carries. Tell us what you produce today and we will tell you what it looks like here.