Archives

This Sampler posting combines two essays from December 2022 that explored the networks of information that feed the investment process of an organization.

A documentary about the Beatles provides examples that are instructive regarding investment teams and the nature of process.

Due diligence encounters are dominated by impression management. Those doing the work need to be skeptical and employ tactics that will go past the narrative to add value.

What types of knowledge are important for investment professionals? How should they be trained? Alix Pasquet offers some thoughtful and differentiated ideas.

While not often taught to investment professionals, the disciplines of sociology and anthropology are essential to understanding both asset pricing and how organizations operate.

This compilation of four postings uses the wonderful book ??????, by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, to examine investment-related concerns about identifying talent, valuing “otherness,” communicating virtually, and doing due diligence on others in the investment ecosystem.

This compilation of four postings offers perspectives about Bill Gross and Pimco aimed at investment professionals. (Thanks to Mary Childs for her book ??? ???? ????, which is referenced throughout.)

Despite the popularity of private equity, beliefs about its performance attributes vary dramatically, while the investment characteristics of the holdings are much different than in the past. That calls for a reassessment.

A report by Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan provides an opportunity to look first at methods for asset managers to improve, and then at how those ideas can serve as angles of discovery for those doing due diligence on managers.

If the goal of an asset management firm is to provide attractive performance that meets the expectations of its clients, then the impediments to that happening should be top of mind for the leaders of an organization.

There is no way to “get it all” when doing due diligence. There will always be gaps in information. It is important to acknowledge them, and to avoid passing the narrative of others along as your own point of view.

A profound change has taken place in many portfolios that are supposed to produce alpha, from a focus on finding the best individual holdings to an environment in which many are “agnostic to security-level information.”

This is a combined republication of two earlier postings that deal with shortcomings in labeling regarding different kinds of “investment advisors” — and the confusing world of “passive” and “indexed” strategies.

The decades of the 1990s and 2000s transformed the investment business. This is the first in an occasional series of postings about that era.

Asset owners suffer from a lack of information on their holdings in an asset class where they have a lot on the line. Can the principles of “organic finance” provide the framework they need?