Field note · 18 February 2026
What belongs in a quarterly sentiment pack
A checklist we use when wealth teams ask for a quarter’s worth of institutional and retail positioning context.
A useful quarterly pack is short. We include the weeks when institutional and retail tone parted company, the weeks they moved together, and one chart or table per market on the watchlist — never a scrapbook of every headline.
We leave out performance attribution for individual client portfolios; that is the adviser’s work. We also leave out forecasts dressed as certainty. What remains is a narrative of sentiment divergence that a partner can read aloud without apology.
If your last quarter’s letter leaned on “markets were risk-on,” a sentiment pack will usually force a sharper sentence: which accounts were risk-on, which were not, and when that gap closed.