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Allocation sets the broad weights. Strategy decides how those weights are expressed: which instruments, which positions, and which risks are taken on purpose.
An allocation framework describes intent at the level of asset classes and broad exposures. Strategy is the layer underneath it: the instruments, structures, and positions that give that intent effect. Two portfolios can hold identical weights on paper and behave nothing alike once strategy has been applied.
We want a strategy that is explicit about the risks it is being paid to take. That means separating risk assumed deliberately in pursuit of a return objective from risk that arrived by accident, through correlation between holdings that looked unrelated, a concentration nobody was tracking, or a structure whose behaviour was not fully understood when it was bought.
Strategy is also where a client's own view of a sector, a region, or a theme enters the portfolio. Those views are often the reason a client is invested in the first place. Our job is to size them so that a correct call counts for something and an incorrect one does not define the outcome.
Sizing each holding against the correlation and concentration limits agreed before anything is bought.
Spending a portfolio's risk on purpose, so it does not simply accumulate one decision at a time.
Adjusting positions as conditions change, inside the boundaries the strategy set at the outset.