Every risk, everywhere.
A large US public pension put its entire multi-asset book — public and private — on one factor framework, so every exposure could be seen and defended across the whole estate.
A portfolio too complex to see asset class by asset class.
A large US public pension fund holds a book that spans nearly every market there is — public equity and fixed income, real assets, and a deep allocation to private markets. Risk lived in silos: each asset class measured on its own terms, with no single, defensible view of how exposures added up across the whole fund.
Northfield decomposed the entire portfolio onto one factor framework. Public and private holdings were modeled side by side, in the same economically interpretable terms — so concentration, stress behavior, and regime sensitivity could be read across the estate rather than reconstructed, asset class by asset class, after the fact.
The result is one risk view the fund can stand behind — to its board, its consultants, and its regulators — refreshed daily, driven by factors anyone can interrogate rather than a black box.
The challenge
- Risk fragmented across asset-class silos, each on its own methodology.
- A large private-markets allocation opaque to standard models.
- No single view of concentration, stress, or regime sensitivity fund-wide.
- Board and staff needing numbers they could explain and defend.
The approach
- The whole book decomposed onto one factor framework.
- Private and real assets modeled alongside public holdings, in the same terms.
- Economically interpretable drivers — not black-box scores.
- Daily risk decomposition across the entire portfolio.
- The methodology run inside the fund's own environment.
Risk you can see — and act on.
With the whole portfolio on one interpretable framework, the fund could find concentration and stress it had been blind to across asset-class silos — and steer allocation, hedging, and liquidity decisions from a single, current view rather than a patchwork stitched together after the quarter closed.
One set of drivers
Every asset class expressed in the same economically interpretable factor exposures.
The opaque, modeled
Private-markets holdings brought onto the same framework as public assets, not left to sit outside the risk view.
Stress the whole book
Concentration, stress behavior, and regime sensitivity read across the estate, not asset class by asset class.
Daily, in-house
Run inside the fund's environment and refreshed daily — a live view, not a quarter-end reconstruction.
Runs on the ALPHA stack
Get in touch
See the whole book at once.
Bring your entire portfolio — public and private — onto one interpretable risk framework, and steer it from a single, current view. Let's map it to your book.
Talk to us →Client anonymized. Drawn from a Northfield engagement with a large US public pension fund, described anonymously in Northfield's published research; figures characterize the scope and cadence of the production risk work rather than any single reported metric.