Managing 300 portfolios is not the same as monitoring 300 portfolios. Dozens of mandates span multiple currencies, risk profiles, and client expectations — and when something shifts (a Perfometer moving from sunny to cloudy, a risk budget quietly breaching its limit, an unexpected cash outflow), the probability of catching it manually before the client does is low. Alerts have been part of Performance Watcher since the early platform. On the new platform, they have been rebuilt from the ground up: broader in scope, more configurable, and fully integrated with the Perfometer and Weather Matrix.
The Problem with Reactive Monitoring
Reactive monitoring works when portfolios are few. At scale, it fails. A team responsible for hundreds of mandates cannot open each portfolio view every morning and expect to catch meaningful deviations before they become operational or reputational problems.
The gap between “I checked last week” and “something changed on Tuesday” is where trust erodes. Community members who manage large banks or trust structures raised exactly this with us: the platform gave them the data, but they needed it to come to them.
Alerts close that gap. The system monitors continuously and surfaces only what requires attention, so teams can focus their time on decisions rather than detection.
Nine Types of Alerts, One Coherent System
Weather alerts fire when a Perfometer status changes: a portfolio moving from sunny to cloudy, or recovering the other way. These are the most visible signals — a shift in the risk/return balance relative to peers.
Performance alerts cover both absolute performance and relative deviation from a defined frame. If a portfolio drifts beyond a threshold you set, in either direction, the system records it and sends notification. Risk alerts follow the same logic: absolute risk levels and relative deviation from the mandate’s declared budget.
In-flow and out-flow alerts track significant cash movements. Data quality alerts flag anomalies in the underlying feed. Extreme value alerts catch outliers across any parameter that falls outside an expected range.
Together, these nine types form a coherent monitoring layer. A portfolio under review by the risk team may trigger weather, risk, and performance alerts simultaneously, and each delivers full context on what changed, when, and by how much.
Configuration and Delivery
Alerts can be set across portfolios, composites, indices, and funds. Each is configured to match the specific risk profile, currency, and monitoring scope of the mandate in question. The observation window is adjustable — a manager who wants to act only on sustained signals rather than single-day noise can set the alert to fire after several consecutive days of adverse conditions.
Delivery runs on two channels: email notification and an in-platform overview panel. Each notification carries the full context needed to act: what triggered the alert, when, supporting data, and a history of prior changes.
Independent Benchmarks Make the Difference
An alert is only as meaningful as the benchmark it measures against. This is where the Performance Watcher model matters.
By default, alerts are triggered against the PWI+, the Performance Watcher Index built from the anonymized, fee-included performance of thousands of real discretionary portfolios, updated daily. When a portfolio’s weather shifts from sunny to cloudy, it is moving relative to actual peer performance across the same risk budget and currency — not a theoretical construction of market indices.
For firms with a defined central investment strategy, alerts can instead be triggered against a composite, comparing each portfolio to the firm’s own reference allocation. Both options exist within the same account.
The PWI+ is not a proxy for the market. It is a live reading of what your direct peers are actually delivering, all fees included. An alert built on that foundation carries evidentiary weight that a threshold-against-an-index cannot.
Where Alerts Sit Inside the Platform
The Alerts feature connects to the same infrastructure that powers the Perfometer and the Weather Matrix. When the Weather Matrix shows a portfolio as cloudy, the alert system is the mechanism that ensures someone is notified, rather than discovering it only at the next portfolio review.
The Performance Watcher community monitors more than 20,000 portfolios representing 70+ billion CHF in assets. At that scale, passive monitoring is not a process. Alerts convert the platform’s daily data processing into active, directed signals.
For CIOs and risk managers, this means the platform becomes part of the operational framework rather than a reporting tool reviewed periodically. The standard does not change; the reach of that standard does.
Oversight at scale requires systematic tools. Alerts give every community member continuous, configurable coverage across all portfolios, composites, indices, and funds, grounded in neutral, peer-based data. To see how the Alerts feature works within your account setup, request a demo at performancewatcher.com/solutions/software.
