Why stage and geography are shown without a score

The decision

Sector concentration and single-company exposure carry flags and affect the Cross-Fund Concentration Score. Stage and geography are shown and not scored.

This is a deliberate methodology choice rather than a limitation waiting to be lifted, and the reasoning is worth understanding because it is the principle the whole engine rests on.

What the methodology chooses to score

Sector or company exposure can build across separate decisions, which makes a combined view useful. It can also be a deliberate strategy. A flag asks you to review the position against the declared mandate, not to assume it was accidental.

Stage and geography often define a fund’s mandate. Their distributions are therefore shown without a concentration penalty in this model. That choice does not establish that every observed pattern matches the strategy; the reader still needs to compare it with the plan.

Why scoring them would produce noise

Suppose the engine did flag stage concentration. A single-stage specialist would be flagged permanently, from its first investment to its last, with no available action. The flag would appear on every report and mean nothing, and its presence would teach a General Partner to ignore the flag list.

That is the real cost. A flag list is only useful if every item on it is worth reading, and the fastest way to make one useless is to fill it with conditions the reader has already decided about. Restraint about what to flag is what makes the flags that do appear worth attention.

What descriptive actually gives you

Not scoring is not the same as not showing. Both distributions are rendered across the firm's deployed capital, and they are frequently the most interesting thing on the page, because a General Partner can bring context the model cannot.

A firm that intended a stage-diversified book and sees its capital bunched at one stage has learned something. A firm that describes itself as continental and finds most of its capital within a few hours of its own office has learned something. Neither is a finding the model could have made, because in both cases the distribution is only meaningful against an intention the model does not hold.

The point of a descriptive view is that it supports the reader's pattern recognition instead of substituting a threshold for it.

Where the line could move

The choice of which dimensions to score is a methodology judgment, and there are real cases that sit near the edge. A firm that declared multi-stage and deployed almost entirely at one stage is a strategy-execution gap of exactly the kind the engine scores elsewhere.

The Portfolio Efficiency engine catches part of that at the fund level by reading declared stage against the rest of the fund's configuration. Whether the firm-level version deserves a flag is a methodology question rather than an arithmetic one, and the honest answer today is that it is described rather than scored.