Perspectives
The Illusion of Protection
August, 2025
The theoretical appeal of hedge funds has always been compelling: uncorrelated returns, downside protection, and sophisticated strategies that promise to navigate any market condition. But for many investors, the lived reality has been quite different. Industry-wide data reveals a sobering truth. In 2008 and again in 2020, most hedge funds failed to protect capital when […]
The End of ‘Normal’?
July, 2025
This week we held our quarterly webinar to provide some more meat on the bones of our current thinking about what may lie ahead and how our strategies have provided strong positive returns over the first half of 2025 whilst the world appears to have become more difficult and risky. The recording of the webinar […]
Human Bias
July, 2025
The Tacit approach to investing stands apart from conventional wisdom. While most investment managers diversify across asset classes, we focus on diversifying risk across low-correlated investments, carefully considering each asset’s risk contribution to the overall portfolio. We believe this distinction is crucial. Traditional approaches may be too passive in their growth allocation, potentially missing optimal […]
Actively passive
July, 2025
We’re often asked why, as an active investment manager, we hold a large proportion of our exposures through index trackers rather than actively managed investments. It’s a fair question and in a world where activity is tracked second by second this may look like we’re busy doing nothing. Our strategies do currently have higher than […]
Why do UK Gilts always yield more than German Bunds
July, 2025
Few weeks pass in the UK without reference to ‘fiscal rules’ or ‘headroom’ on our televisions. The panic created by Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership lives long in the memory for us all. This week witnessed another such example of panic in the government bond market (the Gilt market) over fiscal rules and we feel it […]
Can Europe Rise to the Challenge Posed by Donald Trump’s America?
June, 2025
We are all familiar with the law of unintended consequences or as Helmut von Moltke put it in a sadly topical context, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Donald Trump has breezed through so many norms, protocols, laws and precedents in the course of his still brief (barely 6 months?) second tenure of the […]
Ignorance versus knowing everything
June, 2025
Overconfidence is a common human trait where individuals overestimate their knowledge, abilities, or control over situations, often believing they are better or more skilled than they truly are. This bias can manifest as overestimating one’s performance, believing oneself superior to others, or expressing unwarranted certainty in one’s beliefs. Such miscalibration leads to decision-making errors, risky […]
US Treasuries
June, 2025
Recent headlines about a possible US government debt default are dramatic, but a default—while unlikely—cannot be ruled out. Given its far-reaching consequences, we think it’s useful to clarify the arguments and implications for clients. The current focus on default risk stems from the Mar-a-Lago Accord, a proposed economic strategy developed during Donald Trump’s second term. […]
Demographics
June, 2025
Demographics are deemed to be a material driver of investment returns. The argument goes that the bigger the proportion of the population that is of a working age, the greater the economic value creation and the lower the drain on the public purse. These working people then begin to save, providing a marginal buyer to […]