Research

Most Nigerians are shown a forecast rate of return, decide how much to invest, and meet the risk questionnaire afterwards, which is the wrong order, and this report sets out what the assessment finds when the order is reversed. It is drawn from our own FREBO assessment data rather than from a borrowed questionnaire, reads the results at the level of the five dimensions rather than the usual conservative, moderate and growth boxes, and covers the differences that appear by age and by sex.

Investors are mapped on two axes: Fortress, the weight a person places on protecting what she has, and Opportunism, the weight she places on the chance of more. Four groups appear on the map, and the report's central finding about the Nigerian shelf is that most of what is sold serves only one of them, which is the empty shelf of the title.

The shaded quadrant is the one the Nigerian shelf serves least well: investors who want the floor and the upside in one instrument, and are sold either.

Old Shoreham Investment Management (2026). Attitudes to Risk in Nigeria. Behavioural Research series.

An investor who abandons a strategy when the loss becomes unbearable is not optimising a new utility function; she is revealing a constraint on the paths she is able to hold. This paper makes that observation precise. It replaces the single exit threshold of the earlier literature with a vector of triggers, loss from inception, drawdown from the peak, lag against a reference asset, inactivity and irregularity, each with its own action, and shows that when a trigger reads only the wealth path and its action is absorbing, maximising the value an investor actually realises is equivalent to classical optimisation over a hard drawdown-constrained set. The behavioural contribution is an elicited personal feasibility constraint rather than a new objective, which is why it can be carried into a Merton problem without changing the mathematics of the problem.

The paper also draws the boundary of that result. Two products with identical terminal distributions can differ in every drawdown their holder must survive, so the order-invariant criteria that suitability rests on, volatility, Sharpe, Sortino, value at risk, expected shortfall and the terminal distribution itself, are together insufficient to rank products for a given person. And a trigger that reads external state, a benchmark, a peer, the news, admits no wealth-path representation at all, so part of what investors do cannot be handled as a constraint and must be handled as design.

Oduwole, O. (2026a). When Does Behaviour Reduce to a Wealth-Path Constraint? Trigger Vectors, Filtration Enlargement and the Limits of Pathwise Representation. Old Shoreham Investment Management working paper.

A behavioural product is worth building only if the value it creates for the investors who can hold it exceeds the spread paid to manufacture it, and this paper prices both sides. Assignment value is the gain from matching investors to products by the path each can hold rather than by average product superiority, and it exists only where investors disagree about the ranking of products once conventional preferences are held fixed; a reversal that conventional preferences already explain is not a behavioural result. Manufacturing spread is what the option leg and the funding leg cost.

The boundary between the two is derived as a surface over the floor, the tenor, the investor's risk aversion and the interest rate. Breakevens run from under seventy basis points to several hundred depending on where one stands on that surface, and the region where design pays is identified: partial rather than full floors, longer tenors, and manufacture in-house rather than bought from a bank. In a high-rate, high-volatility market such as Nigeria the clearing structure is an above-par floor with reduced participation, and the breakeven there is largely attributable to implementation rather than to the conventional economics of the note.

Oduwole, O. (2026b). Does Behavioural Product Design Pay for Itself? Assignment Value, Manufacturing Spread and the Boundary for Behavioural Instruments. Old Shoreham Investment Management working paper.