How Nasdaq volatility is impacting investors in early 2026
Nov 17, 2025
Market Insights
Nov 17, 2025
For decades, many investment decisions in institutions and family offices were led by experience, narrative and personal conviction. Senior managers relied on the cycles they had lived through, access to management teams and their own macro view.
Today, markets react faster, capital moves across regions with fewer frictions, and clients ask for clearer explanations of risk. At the same time, data availability and computing power have grown sharply.
The result is not the end of intuition, but a rebalancing. Conviction is still relevant, yet it is now expected to sit on top of transparent analysis and risk metrics, not on isolated judgment.
The main change is the order of the steps, not the removal of people from the process.
Decisions now start with explicit questions, such as: what risk does this position add, how does it affect liquidity, and what drawdown could it create under stress. The objective and constraints come before the trade idea, not after.
Once the question is clear, data is brought in to answer it:
return and volatility histories across different regimes
factor models showing which risks truly drive the portfolio
scenario analysis based on past crises and forward-looking shocks
liquidity estimates for both normal and stressed conditions
These tools do not provide a single “correct” answer. They deliver ranges, scenarios and trade-offs: expected return versus potential loss, and behaviour under specific shocks.
Portfolio managers and investment committees still decide whether the data is reliable, whether the scenario is realistic, and whether the risk fits the mandate. Intuition is used to challenge, adjust or reject model outputs, rather than to bypass them.
Even the best analytics cannot define what is an acceptable loss for a specific pension fund, insurer or family. That choice is linked to objectives, liabilities and values.
Humans remain responsible for:
defining investment philosophy and time horizon
choosing which models, data sources and controls are acceptable
interpreting geopolitical events with no perfect historical parallel
integrating ethical, sustainability or reputational limits
Analytics improves consistency, but accountability stays with people. This is especially relevant for family offices, where legacy and governance across generations matter as much as performance.
Institutions that want to keep pace with this transition can focus on a few priorities:
Treat data and infrastructure as long-term investments, with clear ownership.
Define the role and limits of each model, including review cycles.
Ensure that portfolio, risk and technology teams share a single, consistent view of positions and exposures.
Require that every strategy and major decision can be explained in simple terms.
In this setting, intuition does not disappear. It is placed inside a documented, repeatable and transparent process, which is easier to test under stress and easier to explain to boards, regulators and capital providers.
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