Do brokers provide a sufficiently accurate picture of cyclical risk?

That’s the question one European manager has been asking itself for some time, leading it to unveil a new cyclical risk index in January. The firm in question, Tristan Capital Partners, has said that the index could help to cut through “the bias, noise, data deficiencies and headline grabbing hype” that surrounds real estate in order to get to the “observed reality” of risks.

In a note sent to investors, Simon Martin, head of research at Tristan, says that investors are constantly battling the imperfect nature of commercial property statistics. To counteract this, he and his colleagues have decided to start publishing the most important data as they see it, in the hope that it will make it easier for themselves and investors to differentiate between the reality and the perception of risk.

The manager has constructed its measuring device with the use of real estate data and capital mar