Commentary
Treasury Is a Position, Not a Waiting Room
Cash and short-duration government paper are often treated as where money sits between ideas. We treat them as an allocation with a job, a cost, and a size that is chosen rather than left over.
5 min readReiksgarde Capital
Ask most investors what is in their portfolio and they will list the things they chose: the equities, the funds, the property. Cash rarely makes the list. It is what is left after the choices, the residue between one idea and the next. That framing is comfortable, and it is the reason treasury management is the most neglected part of most portfolios.
At Reiksgarde Capital the treasury sleeve, which means cash balances and short-duration government instruments, is sized on purpose. It has a target range, a reason to be at the top or bottom of that range, and a measured cost when it is too large. This note explains how we think about it, and why the discipline matters more in a rupiah-based fund with foreign holdings than it would in a single-currency portfolio.
The argument has three parts: what treasury is for, what it costs, and how its size is decided. The last part is where most of the judgement lives.
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