Client Stories
What desks noticed after commissioning correlation briefings and diversification reviews.
Helena Croft · Multi-asset desk, Mayfair
Their rolling-window note on FTSE 100 versus Nikkei 225 during the 2022 rates shock changed how we sized the Asia sleeve. The write-up was dense — usefully so — and took a full afternoon to absorb. I would have liked one more chart on sterling-hedged variants, which they added in the revision round.
James Okonkwo · Family office, Kensington
We asked for a diversification review ahead of a trustee meeting. Indexmesh Hub showed that our “regional mix” was effectively one US-tech factor. Mild caveat: they refused to soften that conclusion for the slide deck, which made the meeting sharper than our chair expected — and more honest.
Priya Nair · Research associate, Canary Wharf
The stress briefing on Bunds versus Stoxx 600 for our March pack arrived three days early. Captions were clear enough that our head of risk read the note without calling for a separate explainer. We have since put them on a quarterly retainer for the same eight indices.
Thomas Reeve · CIO, Edinburgh charity endowment
I commissioned the flagship correlation study after a consultant’s heat map left the board cold. Indexmesh Hub’s memorandum named the observation end date, the exact series, and the two crisis windows we chose. One reservation: the fee sat at the top of our research budget, though the trustees used the appendix for months afterward.
Extended note — diversification review for a Kensington family office
The office held four “geographic” sleeves labelled UK, US, Europe, and Asia. Policy language claimed independence. Our review mapped each sleeve to its dominant index drivers and recomputed correlations over 2018–2019 calm months versus the first half of 2020 and the 2022 rates sell-off.
In calm windows, pairwise figures looked comfortably low. In both stress windows, the US and Asia sleeves rose together through shared large-cap growth exposure, while the UK sleeve offered less insulation than the policy document implied. The memorandum recommended rewriting policy wording around factor exposure rather than passport stamps — advice the investment committee adopted at the following meeting.