This newsletter seeks to make a small contribution to the global body of institutional investment thinking. Its aim is simple: to help the next generation of CIOs avoid reinventing investment “wheels” that have already been built, tested, and, in many cases, broken.

Prompted by a recent debate among leading institutional investors on topics including mean-variance optimisation, the Total Portfolio Approach, and the role of asset class specialisation, the paper challenges several increasingly popular views and offers five enduring lessons drawn from decades of institutional investing experience.