Board Bookshelf: Performance Evaluation and Attribution. Analysis and Reporting, Second Edition. By Brian Singer, Russ Wermers, and Bernd R. Fischer. Academic Press. 2026

Evaluating fund performance can be challenging – directors must consider more than just numbers even though numbers are an important part of the assessment. This textbook, Performance Evaluation and Attribution is a helpful tool – albeit with a lot of dizzying math – for learning the basics and even developing fluency with the principles of fund performance. The authors are academics and industry practitioners and their objective, they write, is to distill academic and practitioner research papers into a unified framework. They intend for the book to be used as a reference source for investment practitioners. We skipped over most of the math problems and examples and focused on the basic principles that were accessible even for humanities majors. The first part of the book, in that sense, was quite helpful and we think directors will find most of the material helpful to their work. Below we summarize some of the important topics covered:

• Foundational methodologies used in computation of financial returns, including concepts on time weighted-returns and internal rate of return, and their application in investment performance valuation.
• The role of benchmarks and indices and their different purposes and characteristics in measuring financial performance.
• The basics of attribution analysis.
• Multicurrency performance attribution, which explores the foundations of currency risk and its impact on portfolio returns.

The second half of the book gets more complex, addressing performance for fixed-income portfolios, treatment of derivatives, options and other more advanced topics. Overall, this book is helpful for understanding the principles in analyzing fund performance and evaluating a portfolio manager’s investment approach.