How the work is actually done

Portfolios are built from listed equities, bonds and cash, using low-cost funds where a fund is the efficient way to hold an exposure. Not because complexity is wrong, but because most of the return in this client group is determined by the broad allocation, and most of the risk by a single concentrated holding that the portfolio has to be built around.

The common case in Tanzania is a business owner whose company is the balance sheet. Diversifying away from it is usually slow, sometimes impossible, and always the most important conversation.

Every portfolio, including Tanzanian assets, is reported in US dollars. This is a deliberate choice and it has a cost worth stating plainly.

A dollar figure for a Dar es Salaam property is a conversion at a rate on a date, done outside the reporting system and recorded by hand. If the shilling moves, the dollar figure moves without anything about the property changing. A shilling return and a dollar return over the same period will differ by exactly that movement.

The alternative — mixing currencies in one statement — produces a number that is not a number. One reporting currency, stated openly, is the less misleading of two imperfect options.

Dar es Salaam is UTC+3. London opens mid-morning and New York opens at half past four in the afternoon, closing at eleven at night. The markets most of this money sits in are open when the Tanzanian working day is ending.

In practice that means execution is planned rather than reactive, and it is a reason to prefer instruments and orders that do not require somebody watching a screen at midnight. It is on the front page as a chart because it is a real constraint and not a slogan.