Build vs. Buy: The Portfolio Intelligence Dilemma for Investment Managers

So, you’re an investment manager looking to level up your portfolio analytics and reporting. You’re likely to face a tricky question: Should we build our own system or invest in a platform?  

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At first, building internally seems appealing. You envision a custom solution tailored to your fund’s unique needs, especially tracking positions, decision rationale, and research. Maybe an optimistic engineer even promises a working prototype in a few weeks. But reality rarely cooperates.  

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What starts as a basic tool often expands into a multi-year project. You encounter edge cases, security requirements, compliance complexities, and integration hurdles. Meanwhile, valuable engineering and investment resources are diverted from higher-value work. Many firms reach the same conclusion: building is more complex, slower, and more expensive than expected.  

Excel may seem like a reasonable stopgap, and for many tasks, it can work, but once the analysis becomes nuanced—think timeframe comparisons, portfolio constraints, tracking history, or attribution across multiple dimensions—Excel breaks down.

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Collaboration gets messy. Version control is challenging. Even small changes can cause broken links or inconsistent outputs. What you see in Excel may not reflect how you really want to view and interact with the data.  

That is a fragile foundation for critical decisions.  

Buy First, Then Build on the Right Foundation  

There’s an alternate path: buy a proven platform, then tailor it to your needs.

Alpha Theory offers a comprehensive, battle-tested portfolio intelligence system, refined over 18 years and used by hundreds of top-tier managers. Instead of starting from scratch, you start with a solid core—built for the complexity and scale your team demands.  

With Alpha Theory, you’re not sacrificing flexibility; you’re accelerating it. The platform integrates seamlessly with your existing workflows and tools (yes, including Excel), providing the structure and customization you need without reinventing the wheel.  

The results speak for themselves. With over 13 years of tracked performance, Alpha Theory clients consistently demonstrate a positive return on investment (ROI). The system helps investment teams focus less on maintaining tools and more on making better decisions.  

In short: don’t waste time and resources trying to build what already exists. Let your engineers work on strategic innovations, not core platform maintenance, and let your investment team focus on what matters—outperforming the market.  

Your engineers will thank you—and so will your bottom line.  

What are your thoughts on the build vs buy question?  

We would love to engage with you and hear about your own experiences. Reach out to us at www.alphatheory.com.

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