One dollar-denominated umbrella fund. Four payoff sleeves. Twelve sub-funds, each calibrated to how a real investor actually holds risk, measured by behaviour, not by a form.
Launching soon ◆ Register your interest through your profile
“We do not sell investments. We match people to payoffs they can actually hold.”
The industry asks how much risk you can tolerate. It is the wrong question, asked in the wrong way.
Every risk questionnaire you have ever completed shares the same three flaws. It is self-reported, so people answer aspirationally. It is transparent, so answers can be steered. And a stated preference collected in ten minutes is thin evidence for what a person will actually do in month eleven of a drawdown, which is the only moment that matters.
Payoff investing begins from a different definition. Your true risk profile is the set of payoff distributions you can psychologically hold, through drawdown, through noise, through the long boring middle, without taking action that harms your own outcome. Suitability is not a score in a file. It is the act of matching you to a payoff inside that set.
The unit matters. Investment products are already defined by their payoff diagrams, the whole taxonomy of packaged instruments, from capital protection through yield enhancement, participation, and leverage, is a taxonomy of payoff shapes. When your profile is denominated in payoffs too, matching becomes a genuine comparison rather than a number mapped onto a label.
The variable that decides your outcome is not how much return you want. Everyone wants more. It is how much adverse variation you can absorb before you act against yourself. That is what we measure, and what the fund is built to protect.
The full framework is published in Suitability is Payoff Matching (Payoff Papers No. 01) and at payoffinvesting.com.
No allocation before assessment. Your profile is revealed by decisions, not declared on a form.
Short, pressured decision games (Sapa 2 Japa, Monday Rush, Salary Stream, Double or Nothing) on your own phone. Every decision under uncertainty is a data point you cannot fake.
Your decisions score across five behavioural axes and resolve to one of twelve investor archetypes. Revealed preference, not stated preference.
Each archetype maps to the payoff shapes it can credibly hold, and to the sub-fund built around them. Documented in plain language before you invest a dollar.
Repeat play at review tracks behavioural drift over time. A rebalance is flagged before you feel the discomfort, not after you act on it.
Every instrument in the fund belongs to one of four payoff shapes. Your archetype tells us which shapes you can hold, and the sleeve blend follows.
The floor is the feature. Downside defined at purchase; participation in the upside above it. Built for profiles whose ability to stay invested depends on knowing the worst case in advance.
Natural home of the Conservative cluster.
Income in exchange for ceiling. A defined coupon paid for accepting a cap on the upside. Built for profiles that hold steadiness better than variance, and value what arrives on schedule.
Where Conservative meets Moderate.
The market, held properly. Direct exposure to the underlying, one for one, in both directions. Built for profiles with demonstrated capacity to carry full variance without acting against themselves.
Natural home of the Moderate and Growth clusters.
Conviction, sized. Amplified exposure with risk capital defined at the outset. Built for profiles that seek asymmetry and can absorb the path it takes to get there.
Reserved for the Growth cluster, earned, never defaulted.
Four sleeves ◆ Twelve sub-funds ◆ One calibrated blend per archetype
In 1975, Total Nigeria paid a 30% dividend yield in dollars, and the naira was worth more than the dollar. Quality businesses earned real, hard-currency returns. Then monetary policy went to work. Below: the same ₦620 (one thousand dollars at the start) revalued at each regime, from the exchange’s own record.
Rates: CBN official except 1994 (parallel market; the official rate was frozen at ₦22 while the usable rate was ₦80). Reconstructed from the NSE Factbook archive, 33 volumes, 1975–2013; mid-market ≈₦1,400 per dollar, July 2026.
A 66% devaluation. Treasury bill holders earned positive nominal yields and still lost close to half their wealth in dollar terms in a single year.
Domiciliary accounts frozen. The official rate pegged at ₦22 per dollar while the parallel market priced ₦80, a 264% spread between the naira you held and the naira you could use.
The NSE banking index fell 74%. Naira portfolios concentrated in the boom sector were erased inside twelve months.
Artificial pegs held for months, then broke in step devaluations. Savers absorbed the loss overnight, twice in a decade.
What destroyed the returns was not the market. It was monetary policy. Every collapse in investor wealth from 1986 onward traces to the currency, not the underlying businesses. Across every regime change, freeze and float, wealth measured and held in dollars retained value. Wealth measured in naira did not.
“Nominal safety is not real safety. In a devaluation regime, the risk-free rate is not risk-free.”
Take one thousand dollars of savings, convert it to naira today, ₦1.4 million, and let the next fifty years repeat the last fifty at the recorded average: 16.7% a year, compounding. No coup, no crisis, no collapse assumed.
“But my naira account pays double digits.” To merely stand still in dollars at the historical pace, a naira portfolio must earn 16.7% net, every year, for fifty years, with no freeze, no gap, no redenomination. At a 15% coupon, one 1986 erases five years of interest overnight, and the record contains a 1986 roughly every decade.
This is not a forecast. It is what the base rate does to a working life. The one variable you control is the unit your wealth is measured in.
Mechanical extrapolation of the 1976–2026 depreciation rate (≈16.7% p.a., ₦0.62 to ≈₦1,400 per dollar); an illustration of the historical base rate, not a prediction. Scenario figures compound the stated rates over fifty years. Mid-market rate, July 2026.
Fifty years of market history point in one direction. The MBW Umbrella Fund is the vehicle built on it.
The framework: holding capacity as the real variable, and the payoff as the unit of suitability.
The naira-destruction thesis and the behavioural alpha argument for offshore dollar vehicles.
Financial history, told properly. The What Survived series draws directly from this archive.
The Nigerian stock exchange record, 1975–2013, digitised across 33 volumes. The evidence base under the fund.
The Umbrella Fund is not yet open. Play the games today to build your profile, and you’ll be first in line when it launches.