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I dig this comment. I think it speaks to the idea that when it comes to improving one's decision-making skills it's important to share your opinions / decisions

by qwrusz 10y ago

I dig this comment. I think it speaks to the idea that when it comes to improving one's decision-making skills it's important to share your opinions / decisions with others when possible and also unabashedly share how you reached your opinion Unabashed openness in how and why you think something appears to be the hardest part for people. Maybe because it includes saying things like "I don't know" or saying to a group of people a sentence like "My opinion on xyz is based on intuition, I apologize I can't point to a more scientific reason for my opinion right now but just because something is a gut feeling doesn't mean it is incorrect". This kind of talk is especially difficult in corporate environments where, in general, managers or aspiring leaders saying something like "I don't know" is verboten. Q: You mentioned you are an investor. It wasn't clear what type of investing you do or if you do this professionally or if you're a one-man shop. But you also said something about getting feedback on decisions on the internet? (I also saw you said it is horrible :). I'm just curious where on the internet could you even have tried this getting feedback as an investor? While I don't know of a professional investment firm that would allow employees to discuss live investment decisions on the internet assuming it happens anyway; is there a website or something where professional investors discuss investment decisions and their theses online? I work in finance and invest professionally (I don't call myself an investor though maybe because most of the money belongs to other people). Anyway my experience has been (both at my current fund and previous fund) the PM decision-making processes and managing risks like bias or miscalculation are taken so so seriously now: There is a formal internal procedure for decisions that lead to investment portfolio changes and an external company/consulting firm is hired specifically to evaluate and improve decision making by humans and machines. Decision making has fallen into the "risk management" category and it is not taken lightly.

dharmon 10y ago
Sometimes my wife and I will go for walks and I talk her through my thinking on whatever I'm currently looking at. Even though she's not a finance person, just sharing my thought process with a super smart person helps me identify flaws or develop insights. I'm a one-man shop investing my own money (in plain jane public markets), so I have no restrictions on discussing. Value Investor's Club is good, as is Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax. I use Seeking Alpha because these people are amazing at digging up data. I just ignore the analysis cause it's usually pretty weak. I see people share their theses on these sites and places like Reddit and from the inconsistent quality in feedback they get I decided it would not be a valuable thing for me to do. To each their own, I guess. Crazy how institutionalized risk management is (hopefully it is beyond just VAR these days). My risk management is a little folksy by comparison: what's the most I could lose here? how likely is that to happen? and how much am I willing to lose? Are you an analyst at a fund?
- qwrusz 10y ago
  Thanks. I took a first quick look at the 3 sites you mentioned and will check them out again. I can see the value investing tilt and how that lends itself more to such discussion forums; as value investing can sometimes have this cool sort of "story telling" component to it where sharing one's trade idea or "story" about a company, and getting feedback on that and hearing other folks' tell their story ideas does make sense. But I also see what you mean about quality and noise being issues that can make these sites not very practical and potentially may end up hurting more than helping. I have a colleague who eats lunch with his wife 2-3 times a week and I have seen how much it helps him at work on those days. She is not a finance person but she is super smart and consistently offers unique perspective (I have asked if we can hire her). Connected idea (and admittedly I don't do this often as I probably should) but in general talking to a smart non-finance person about a finance idea can have tons of benefits for a trader: 1) You get to simplify things when you explain and can't use bullshit ambiguous obscuring "finance speak" vocab (leverage delta asymmetry you say?...Nope) 2) There is this hard to explain benefit when no one is trying to "win" in a discussion. By "win" here I mean, we debate finance shit in the office all the time, every day all day, and it's genial and effective and all that, but everyone is vested in it and there is this tint of guys trying to "win at discussions" or show off knowledge or be more right or they just want to have had a part in it (sorry hard to explain this, it's not alpha male posing, rather it's people want to help and want to feel they have contributed to things, like if this was a movie being made everyone wants their name in there when the credits roll, that's ok but it can be counterproductive). Someone willing to help and listen and maybe offer insight, without consciously or subconsciously caring about credit or getting anything in return is quite hard to find, but it's a real gift when you find such a person...AND it's a gift worth giving if you can be such a person to someone else. Yes way past "VaR", only really hear that term in government or regulatory stuff, internal risk management would never use such unclear, inexplicit terminology like "value" or "risk" nor simplify bad serious events to a number or two. I like your style, it's not folksy, how many US dollars could someone lose is fundamentally THE risk and the rule in finance that matters. Spent years as an analyst, now in more of a management role, supervising and training the new younger analysts who don't hate flying yet and who apparently learned nothing in school relevant to working in asset management in the real world. I still do financial analyst work mainly in special situations as they come up. Yes, mid-size multi-strat fund, I co-babysit the credit L/S desks for now. Might semi-retire if the office keeps talking about politics all day. No patience for it :)

by qwrusz 10y ago

dharmon 10y ago

Sometimes my wife and I will go for walks and I talk her through my thinking on whatever I'm currently looking at. Even though she's not a finance person, just sharing my thought process with a super smart person helps me identify flaws or develop insights. I'm a one-man shop investing my own money (in plain jane public markets), so I have no restrictions on discussing. Value Investor's Club is good, as is Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax. I use Seeking Alpha because these people are amazing at digging up data. I just ignore the analysis cause it's usually pretty weak. I see people share their theses on these sites and places like Reddit and from the inconsistent quality in feedback they get I decided it would not be a valuable thing for me to do. To each their own, I guess. Crazy how institutionalized risk management is (hopefully it is beyond just VAR these days). My risk management is a little folksy by comparison: what's the most I could lose here? how likely is that to happen? and how much am I willing to lose? Are you an analyst at a fund?

qwrusz 10y ago
Thanks. I took a first quick look at the 3 sites you mentioned and will check them out again. I can see the value investing tilt and how that lends itself more to such discussion forums; as value investing can sometimes have this cool sort of "story telling" component to it where sharing one's trade idea or "story" about a company, and getting feedback on that and hearing other folks' tell their story ideas does make sense. But I also see what you mean about quality and noise being issues that can make these sites not very practical and potentially may end up hurting more than helping. I have a colleague who eats lunch with his wife 2-3 times a week and I have seen how much it helps him at work on those days. She is not a finance person but she is super smart and consistently offers unique perspective (I have asked if we can hire her). Connected idea (and admittedly I don't do this often as I probably should) but in general talking to a smart non-finance person about a finance idea can have tons of benefits for a trader: 1) You get to simplify things when you explain and can't use bullshit ambiguous obscuring "finance speak" vocab (leverage delta asymmetry you say?...Nope) 2) There is this hard to explain benefit when no one is trying to "win" in a discussion. By "win" here I mean, we debate finance shit in the office all the time, every day all day, and it's genial and effective and all that, but everyone is vested in it and there is this tint of guys trying to "win at discussions" or show off knowledge or be more right or they just want to have had a part in it (sorry hard to explain this, it's not alpha male posing, rather it's people want to help and want to feel they have contributed to things, like if this was a movie being made everyone wants their name in there when the credits roll, that's ok but it can be counterproductive). Someone willing to help and listen and maybe offer insight, without consciously or subconsciously caring about credit or getting anything in return is quite hard to find, but it's a real gift when you find such a person...AND it's a gift worth giving if you can be such a person to someone else. Yes way past "VaR", only really hear that term in government or regulatory stuff, internal risk management would never use such unclear, inexplicit terminology like "value" or "risk" nor simplify bad serious events to a number or two. I like your style, it's not folksy, how many US dollars could someone lose is fundamentally THE risk and the rule in finance that matters. Spent years as an analyst, now in more of a management role, supervising and training the new younger analysts who don't hate flying yet and who apparently learned nothing in school relevant to working in asset management in the real world. I still do financial analyst work mainly in special situations as they come up. Yes, mid-size multi-strat fund, I co-babysit the credit L/S desks for now. Might semi-retire if the office keeps talking about politics all day. No patience for it :)