The sharks have smelled blood in the water, are circling, and are ready to chomp. Clearly, there’s excitement in newsrooms across the globe over a number of well-known hedge fund managers having once again suffered significant losses in November and that their year-to-date performance is abysmal at best. I won’t take time to name names; you can just plug “hedge fund performance” into Google to see who’s down and by how much for the month and year. And while the poor performance is troubling, I’m also concerned about the process they’ve been using.
Understanding the investment process is key. It is important not only to know the managers’ strategy, but also how they implement it – the method behind the madness, so to speak. It‘s bad enough to hear or read that a manager lost 5% in November and is likely to be down 20 % for the year; the questions that need to be asked are how did this happen, what‘s being done to curb the losses, and what, if anything, has the manager learned from the experience.
As we enter the last month of the year, people tend to take stock in many aspects of their lives and start planning for change in the New Year (This why gym memberships start to spike). Well, don’t forget to take stock of your investment managers, make sure you understand their process and agree with what they are doing. If not, redeem and find someone new. It is, after all, your money.
We are just two months away from Operations for Alternatives. The event is going to be held in Miami this time, February 1-2, 2016. The program is full of interesting sessions on the most-pressing issues facing the investment management industry. If you are interested in attending an event that is the largest gathering of operations professionals, I recommend you register today by clicking here.
THINGS THAT DRIVE ME CRAZY
I am sick and tired of people being rude. Sure, everybody’s in hurry, and everybody’s time is precious, but the lack of respect that people show for one another is not good. Perhaps it’s because people are no longer used to communicating in person – thank you Mr. Jobs – or maybe it is because people are just jerks. Either way, people have got to start being nice to each other. Now before any of you think that I’m about to ask everybody to sit in a circle and hold hands — don’t worry, I’m not – all I am saying is please, have a little common courtesy. It goes a long way.