There will be a broad mix of approaches taken in the Learning Curve category of postings. This first one is an echo of the Letters to a Young Analyst quarterly newsletters; that ebook and its newletters were the inspiration for Learning Curve. (Buyers of the book now receive a two-month subscription to The Investment Ecosystem rather than the newsletters.)
Enjoy the links.
Education
Verdad shared the curriculum it provides those in its internship program. It contains summaries of and links to foundational research that has shaped the investment world. A great resource.
An updated edition of Expectations Investing, the influential book by Michael Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport, has just been released. Included on the site for the book are some online tutorials that you might find of benefit.
If you’re working within one asset class, you might not be too familiar with other ones. Sampling them on a regular basis will help you spot opportunities and connections, and to prepare for other roles in the future. But where to start? One stop for short explainers is the “sector in brief” collection from consulting firm bfinance.
Analysis
The ecosystem is always changing, as are the tactics of thoughtful analysts, amateur and professional. Gavin Baker tweeted about the “awesome sleuthing from someone on r/wallstreetbets” concerning the discovery of an active site link at Amazon related to Affirm in mid-August. The news of the relationship between the two firms hit fifteen days later.
How can you deal with information overload (from Reddit and everything else)? Commentary from AIM13.
All of the presentations from VALUEx Vail over the years can be found online. The gathering was started by Vitaliy Katsenelson in 2011. While the decade has been challenging on a relative basis for value investors, you might find the slide decks instructive.
Visualization is a powerful tool. How well can you tell a story with just a few words and a number of pictures? Take a look at this piece from Polen Capital, “Could Software be a Safer Investment than Consumer Staples?” A minimalist approach can often get the point across more effectively than a detailed one. (Although the messy product graphic in Figure 8 was a mistake; it pales in comparison to the simplicity and effectiveness of the other images.)
With the software packages that are now available, you can select from a number of different kinds of graphics to tell a story. (We’ll get into some examples, good and bad, in future postings.) To illustrate the point, here’s an article from Flourish, “One dataset, ten visualizations.”
Careers
The Financial Times recently hosted a webinar, “The next generation of asset managers: Securing your dream job in financial services,” which is available on demand. The panelists (all women, a rarity in the investment world) described a changing landscape for the investment talent. The requirements for hiring are changing, especially for entry-level positions, and the skills needed for many positions are broadening out from investment ones to include other capabilities. The future of work — including new arrangements hastened by the pandemic, plus the ongoing displacement of many job functions as machines take over the repetitive parts of investment duties — will bring challenges, for sure, but opportunities for those who can adjust.
Rest in peace
Michael Falk accomplished a great deal in a little more than a half century. Among his contributions to the investment profession was a monograph for the CFA Institute Research Foundation, “Let’s All Learn How to Fish . . . to Sustain Long-Term Economic Growth.” In 2019, he reflected on the goals of that book — and the diagnosis of ALS that would take his life.
Published: October 20, 2021
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