A number without a standard behind it is just an opinion wearing a suit. Standards are what let a valuation — or a decision — be checked, compared and trusted.

In a field where everyone can produce a figure, the figure itself proves very little. Two people can look at the same asset and reach numbers a world apart, each perfectly sincere. What tells you which one to rely on is not confidence, seniority or presentation. It is whether the work was done to a standard — a shared, recognised way of defining terms, gathering evidence and reaching a conclusion. Standards are quiet, unglamorous, and they are the difference between analysis and assertion.

A standard is a shared language

Words like value, yield and risk feel precise until two people use them to mean different things. A recognised standard fixes the definitions, so that when you and I disagree, we are disagreeing about inputs and evidence rather than talking past each other. That may sound modest. It is in fact the foundation of every serious conversation about an asset — the reason a discussion can converge instead of dissolving into competing opinions.

Standards make work checkable

The real test of any analysis is whether someone else, following the same method, would arrive somewhere near your conclusion. A standard exists precisely so that your reasoning can be retraced. This is what protects a decision after the fact — not the elegance of the answer, but the fact that the path to it is transparent and repeatable. An opinion asks you to trust the person. A standard lets you check the work.

They protect you from yourself

The most dangerous bias is the one you cannot see in your own thinking — the assumption you never questioned because it flattered the conclusion you already wanted. A standard is an external discipline that catches the shortcut you would otherwise take. It slows you down at exactly the moments when speed is most tempting and least wise. Applied honestly, it is less a constraint than a safeguard against your own optimism.

Opinions are cheap and abundant. A standard is what makes a judgement worth relying on — including your own.

They travel

Across borders, across teams and across time, a standard is what makes a decision reached in one place legible in another. A buyer, a lender and a partner in three different countries can read the same piece of work and know what it means, because it was built on common ground rather than local habit. For anyone operating across markets, this is not a refinement. It is the only way trust scales beyond the people you already know.

None of this makes standards a substitute for judgement. They do not tell you what to decide. They make your judgement legible, defensible and worth something to the people who have to rely on it — which, in the end, includes you.

José Covas

FRICS · Founder & Principal