Designed to Impress.

For decades, investment committees and advisors have relied on scorecards to simplify fund selection and monitoring. While scorecards serve a useful purpose, they also introduce an unintended risk: they reduce complex investment behavior into point-in-time scores that often mask dispersion, persistence, and downside asymmetry. In high-stakes fiduciary settings, simplification can quietly become oversimplification.

CGOG™ (Consistently Good, Occasionally Great™) was developed to address this exact gap. Born out of real-world fiduciary litigation and expert-witness analysis, CGOG™ is a PlanTools proprietary investment research methodology designed to identify managers whose excess returns demonstrate precision, accuracy, and consistency over time, rather than episodic outperformance. Instead of rankings or snapshots, CGOG™ evaluates excess return distributions through deep time-series analysis to distinguish skill from noise.

Beyond Traditional Scorecards

Traditional scorecards tend to reward relative ranking, which by definition elevates roughly half of a peer group regardless of whether returns are repeatable or accidental. CGOG™ takes a different approach. It focuses on identifying managers that generate smooth, low-volatility cumulative excess returns, high-probability “singles and doubles”, while avoiding the performance-chasing behavior that often leads to negative surprises and uncomfortable committee meetings.

A Complement, Not a Replacement

Importantly, CGOG™ is not a replacement for a scorecard; it is a necessary complement. Scorecards are effective at narrowing a broad universe and supporting ongoing monitoring, but they are insufficient as authoritative decision-making tools. A score of “10” does not distinguish between a marginal fund and a truly exceptional one. CGOG™ operates beyond the scorecard to surface those differences. In practice, CGOG™-identified funds should score well on most scorecards; when they do not, it is often the scorecard construction, not the fund, that warrants reconsideration.

Built for Fiduciary Defense

CGOG™ is well-suited for fiduciary defense, core menu construction, QDIA evaluation, and the next generation of personalized retirement solutions across all major asset classes. By identifying managers with repeatable excess-return characteristics, CGOG™ reduces unnecessary fund turnover, strengthens fiduciary documentation, and allows advisors to spend more time growing relationships rather than constantly replacing investments.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line: scorecards are part of a prudent process, but they should never be the entire process. CGOG™ is the missing analytical layer that helps fiduciaries identify consistency, manage risk, and build defensible investment decisions grounded in evidence rather than scores.

If you want to demonstrate true investment acumen, acumen that holds up in committee rooms and courtrooms alike, you need a research tool designed for predictability, not promotion. You need CGOG™.

For more information on CGOG™ contact David J Witz, CEO PlanTools, LLC at david@plantools.com or 704-564-0482.