The Glossary
Complete explanations of the key concepts of the Performance Watcher App and its ancillary services
Overview
The Overview is the immutable landing page of the Performance Watcher platform. It is the user’s daily cockpit—designed to deliver a high-level, consolidated view of everything necessary across the ecosystem: risk, return, portfolio behaviour, peer comparisons, news and alerts, and quick links to frequently used tools.
Purpose
To serve as the starting point for supervision, positioning, and alerts.
To summarise the current state of performance and risk across portfolios and composites.
To provide quick access to favourite dashboards, analyses, and alerts.
To enable immediate visual triage for prioritisation of follow-up.
Structure & Features
While its layout is fixed (users cannot add or remove elements), users can reorder sections to suit their workflow. All track and risk data are based on the default period, i.e. a YTD period with at least 15 months.
Key components include:
Key Metrics & Distributions
Performance quality (via Perfometer-style summaries)
Risk/Return Overview: scatter plots or tables of portfolio positioning
Return Distributions: helps identify outliers and dispersion within a peer group
Exposure by Risk Level and Currency: breakdown of ecosystem allocations
Alerts Summary
A centralised area displaying any triggered performance or risk alerts.
Alerts are based on deviation from declared risk, unusual flows, or sharp underperformance relative to peers.
Users can click through to relevant dashboards or instruments directly from the alert panel.
Favourite Dashboards & Analyses
Shortcuts to the most relevant tools for the user’s daily work.
Includes dashboards (e.g., CHF Portfolios or All Advisory)
Individual favourite analysis (e.g., a flagship client portfolio). Frequently used instruments (portfolios, composites, or indices) can be bookmarked here.
Weather Overviews
A condensed visual showing the current “weather” for the ecosystem:
How many portfolios are sunny, fair, cloudy, or stormy
The weather for the composites of the Ecosystem
Provides a fast health check of the entire book.
User Access & Personalisation
Overview adapts to the user’s ecosystem and access rights.
A relationship manager sees only their clients.
A CIO sees all discretionary portfolios firm-wide.
Users can reorder sections based on priority (e.g., moving Alerts or Favorites to the top).
Data is updated daily, reflecting the last available net-of-fees performance.
Typical Use Cases
Morning Check-In: A quick scan of what’s working and what needs attention.
Team Coordination: Managers can use Overview to assign follow-up based on underperformance or risk alerts.
Client Prep: Identify weather changes or new alerts before a call or meeting.
Benefits
Zero configuration needed: Ready to use from day one.
Unified control panel: Everything most important, summarised in one page.
Intelligent triage: Highlights deviations from expected risk/return and allows immediate follow-up.
Client-ready insights: At-a-glance performance summaries without needing to dig through dashboards.
Ecosystem
Dashboards
Dashboards are one of the central modules of Performance Watcher, offering a real-time, multi-portfolio visualisation interface that empowers users to evaluate, supervise, and explain investment performance.
Dashboards aggregate various analytics, charts and tables into an interactive, customizable layout, making them ideal for both internal portfolio monitoring and external client reporting.
Purpose
To consolidate key insights about multiple portfolios (or other instruments) into one interface.
To compare performance and risk characteristics relative to benchmarks or peer groups.
To streamline daily supervision, client communication, and strategic decision-making.
Structure & Components
Dashboards are made up of three main building blocks:
Global Filter
Sets shared parameters for the entire dashboard:
Currency
Risk level
Date range
Ensures consistency across instruments and metrics.
Sections
Each section contains a subset of instruments (portfolios, indices, composites, or funds).
Filters are hierarchical: section filters must be subsets of the global filter.
Users can drill down into specific risk levels, manager groups, or custom views.
Blocks
Each section can display up to six blocks, which include:
X-Y charts (risk/return, relative performance)
Rolling return and volatility charts
Tables (returns, volatilities, relative metrics)
Weather (Perfometer) charts
Pie charts or flow tables
All blocks support daily-updated, net-of-fees performance data.
Features
Customizable Layouts: Users can build dashboards from scratch or use pre-built templates.
Favorites & Tagging: Dashboards can be saved, tagged, and marked as favorites for quick access via the Overview page.
Duplication: Dashboards can be duplicated and modified to reuse structure with different filters.
Time Horizon Control: Date settings can be adjusted globally or per section. Changing the global date resets all section-level dates.
Use Cases
Portfolio Managers: Track relative performance across mandates and identify underperformers.
Compliance Teams: Verify alignment with declared risk levels using tools like the Risk Budget Check.
Relationship Managers: Use client-specific dashboards with intuitive visuals (weather, relative returns) to guide discussions.
Executives & CIOs: Get top-down insights into strategy performance at the firm or team level.
Benefits
Time-Saving: Automated updates eliminate manual data collection and Excel work.
Clarity: Prebuilt visual tools like Perfometer and peer comparison X-Y charts make interpretation fast and intuitive.
Consistency: Uniform metrics and filters ensure that all users in an organisation are looking at the same reality.
Objectivity: Dashboards enable managers to compare results against benchmarks and the wider PW community with full transparency.