I Made a Call During the Japan Tsunami. I Still Don't Know If It Was Right.
The chain of assumptions behind every allocation call.
It was March 2011. One day. That’s how much time my team had to decide whether to increase our allocation to Japan.
The earthquake had hit. The tsunami followed. Fukushima was unfolding in real time on every screen in the office. And somewhere in that chaos, a portfolio decision was waiting for an answer: do we buy the dip, or do we step back?
We made a call. I won’t tell you what it was, that’s not the point of this story. The point is what happened after.
For weeks afterward, I kept asking myself the same question: was it the right one? Not “did it work out”, markets can reward bad decisions and punish good ones, that’s just how distributions behave. The question that stayed with me was different: did we actually know why we made that call, or did we just feel confident about it?
That distinction, between knowing your reasoning and merely feeling conviction, turned out to be the most important thing I learned in this industry. And it’s the reason this publication exists.
The chain nobody shows you
Every allocation decision, mine included, is built on a chain of assumptions. An inflation assumption. A growth assumption. A correlation assumption that may or may not hold under stress. Somewhere at the end of that chain sits a label: Overweight, Neutral, Underweight, the industry’s shorthand for buy more, hold steady, or sell down.
What most investors see is the label. What they almost never see is the chain.
That’s true even, especially, when the decision comes from a major institution. A bank with hundreds of analysts publishes a house view on European equities. The view itself is visible. The reasoning behind it, the assumptions it rests on, the dissent inside the building before that view was finalized, that part stays in the building.
Multiply that by every asset manager, every bank, every research house publishing a monthly view, and you get a strange situation: the institutions managing $50+ trillion are, collectively, the best-informed body of opinion on asset allocation that exists. And almost none of that reasoning is visible to anyone outside their own walls.
I didn’t set out to fix that. I started doing it for myself, because after Japan I no longer trusted conviction on its own, mine or anyone else’s. I wanted to know what the rest of the field was actually thinking, and why. So I started reading.
What reading 60+ reports a month actually tells you
It started as a handful of reports. It’s now more than 60, every month, from banks, asset managers, and research houses, across 25+ asset classes. Not to find the “best” view. To find where the field agrees, where it quietly disagrees, and where everyone is repeating the same assumption without anyone having stress-tested it recently.
That last category is the one that matters most, and it’s the one no single report can ever show you. A single bank can tell you what it thinks. Only reading across dozens of them, side by side, every month, shows you what the field is doing as a whole, and where that collective position has become more crowded, or more fragile, than any one house view would reveal.
This is asset allocation, not stock-picking , and that distinction matters more than most investors realize. Research consistently shows that more than 80% of a portfolio’s long-term return is explained by the allocation decision itself, not by which individual names sit inside it. Get the chain of assumptions behind that allocation wrong, and no amount of skill in picking names within it fully makes up for it.
The consensus is a starting point, not a verdict
I want to be precise about what this is, because it’s easy to misread. The consensus I extract every month is not a signal to follow blindly. It’s not “the market is right, do what it does.”
It’s a baseline. A reference point built from the most informed, best-resourced opinion available, against which you can measure your own view. Sometimes you’ll read it and find you agree, and that agreement is worth something: you’re not running with the herd by accident, you’re running with it because the reasoning holds up under scrutiny. Sometimes you’ll disagree, and that’s valuable too, because now you know precisely where, and why, your view diverges from the field’s. And sometimes, reading it will reveal that a position you thought was your own conviction was actually just everyone else’s crowded trade, dressed up as independent thinking.
Running with the consensus, deliberately diverging from it, or unknowingly caught inside it, those are three very different positions to be in. Most investors don’t know which one they’re in, because they never see the consensus clearly enough to compare themselves against it.
What this looks like, in practice
That’s the work this publication does, every month:
A structured Monthly Consensus across 25+ asset classes, not just the Overweight/Neutral/Underweight calls, but the reasoning chains behind them
Quarterly Expected Returns, tracking long-term capital market assumptions as they shift
AI & Allocation Signals, verified cases where AI is genuinely influencing institutional capital allocation, separated from the noise
Award-Winner Interviews with allocators who’ve actually delivered, not just theorized
I read so you don’t have to. Not because the reports are inaccessible, many of them are public, but because nobody has the time to read sixty of them every month, extract what’s shared and what’s disputed, and turn that into something you can actually use to check your own thinking against.
Why I’m telling you this
I’m not asking you to trust my conviction. After Japan, I stopped trusting conviction as a standalone signal, including my own. What I’m offering instead is the chain: the reasoning, made visible, month after month, across the full field rather than any single house.
What you do with that is yours to decide. Run with it. Diverge from it, deliberately. Or use it to find out, for the first time, which one you’ve actually been doing all along.
If that’s a question worth answering for your own portfolio, the monthly version of this, the full chain, not just the label, is free to read. Every month, no exceptions.