Changing the performance benchmark for the police from the number of arrests to reductions in the number of reported crimes has also been crucial.
In fact, Morningstar categorizes more than 60 municipal bond mutual funds as intermediate, of which several use one of the BarCap Municipal intermediate indices or similar index as a performance benchmark.
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He suspects some of the listings were submitted by vendors who ran Linpack (the standard code used to measure supercomputing performance) benchmark before delivering the systems to their customers and then submitted those systems for the list without telling their customers.
In effect, the manager has a 5% handicap, making it harder to consistently achieve even benchmark performance.
This may lead you to buy passively-managed low-cost index funds that track benchmark performance less a small fee.
This half-build system achieved the world's best LINPACK(2) benchmark performance of 8.162 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), to place it at the head of the TOP500 list.
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When a money manager fails to perform up to the benchmark he has established for himself, the manager might (1) simply acknowledge his poor performance or (2) change the benchmark to one that will make his performance appear better.
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Performance lagged behind the benchmark indices for 63.3% of large-cap funds, 80.5% of mid-cap funds and 66.5% of small cap funds.
Some LPs have learned from hard experience that most PE funds can lay claim to top-quartile performance by selecting the benchmark that makes them look best.
In practice, companies are likely to weight the extent of out performance against their chosen benchmark, which would give them flexibility in dealing with up and down markets.
As for the performance freaks, you can enable Ultimate mode which is right at the bottom of the "ASUS customized setting" menu, but we didn't notice any performance gain during our benchmark tests.
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Leveraged ETFs seek to deliver multiples of the performance of the index or benchmark they track.
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In its last fiscal year, the endowment shrank by 27.3% compared to the 18.2% drop of the Trust Universe Comparison Service, a widely used benchmark for the performance of institutional assets.
However, as index-based mutual funds and ETFs continue to gain popularity and active managers are increasingly pressured to control their performance tracking error relative to benchmark indexes, the markets could become less efficient.
Unilever says that over those 14 months Mercury underperformed an undisclosed benchmark by over ten percentage points, against an agreed performance floor of three percentage points a year below the benchmark.
Keeping this in mind, you may want to design your own personal benchmark that measures absolute performance (i.e. performance vs. your investment goals) rather than performance relative to the market.
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Tire degradation was mixed during testing but the colder temperatures in Spain mean performance there is not an exact benchmark for the warmer climes coming up in the first two races in Australia and Malaysia.
Actively-managed funds are more difficult to match and it is a little harder to compare the performance of your holdings to a true benchmark.
Mr. Gross's fund returned 4.16% for the year, its worst performance since 2006 and far behind the benchmark Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index's 7.84% gain, according to Morningstar.
And we should point out that not holding Apple in the Russell 3000 Value index had cost that benchmark 349 basis points of performance versus the Russell 3000 Growth index.
Razer, the world leader in high-performance gaming hardware, set a technological benchmark today with the release of its new Razer DeathStalker Ultimate gaming keyboard, featuring Razer's award-winning Switchblade User Interface (UI).
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The study provides benchmark values of data attributes and performance improvements for many verticals.
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Instead of linking pay with performance, clearer disclosure has simply raised the benchmark for all executive salaries.
As more pan-European indices become available, some mediocre fund managers may compare their funds with the least challenging benchmark in order to beautify their performance, leaving clients in a marketing haze.
From next year, school-performance league tables will be based on the new benchmark.
The Russell 2000 Index (RUT), a popular benchmark for mutual funds to track their performance against, closed at an all-time high last Wednesday, surpassing the previous high reached in July 2007.
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Flip through the pages of any financial publication and you will likely see several ads by mutual fund companies touting their superior relative historical performance and high ranking amongst their peer group and benchmark.
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But using it as a benchmark, generally, to compare technology stock performance probably misses some subtleties.
The performance of the best councils will be used as a benchmark by an independent inspectorate.
While those rumors have yet to be confirmed, it does seem possible that Apple is indeed working on a way for OS X users to run Windows apps, and wants to use BAPco's tools to benchmark the Windows-on-OS X performance (though the tools are said not to work all that well in virtual environments).
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