Seven Habits of Highly Successful Portfolio Managers
In today’s hyper-competitive business world, there’s a never-ending deluge of self-help lists, man- agement consultants, and executive mentorship training. You can read Medium or HBR, you can watch TED talks, and you can attend a Coursera webinar. While most management observers point to improved baselines across corporations, the zeitgeist of media attention gravitated toward the Silicon Valley startup space and their novel adaptations toward scaling. Meanwhile, asset management has seemingly lagged behind the cutting edge, as today’s young talent opts for Mountain View instead of Wall Street. Whether or not you see this as a secular change or simply a cyclical trend, little has been written about asset management needing to evolve in the face of a drastically different regulatory and competitive landscape.
In the active management space, specically, the image of hedge funds run by eccentric geniuses barking out buy orders like soothsayers is a dying trope. In today’s world, top management techniques will be a requisite for fund managers to survive the washout of organizations hit by re- demptions, closures, and fee compression. The later point, in particular, has forced noticeable belt-tightening amidst a historically pro igate niche industry. The silver lining here is that tight- ening can be healthy if it leads to more prudent evaluation of expenditures and emphasis on cultivating human capital.
In this piece, I’ll use personal experience in- teracting with dozens of hedge fund PMs—from small 50mm startups to multi-billion-dollar world-beaters—to explore successful tech- niques in running great businesses instead of simply making great investments. Borrowing a theme from our friends over at Sentieo, these techniques will be framed around (you guessed it) Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.
The well worth the read article can be accessed here: Seven Habits of Highly Successful Portfolio Managers
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