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Yes 😂 Whenever I see, hear or read anything, my first thought is 'So what? What's the other side of the story?' Etc. Which tbh isn't a bad thing - it forces me to consider all possibilities which gives me a more balanced perspective. Whenever I think of anything with my personal biases, I recognize it immediately.
Whenever I'm presented with a good deal (items going on sale, friend giving me a gift etc), my first thought is 'No way. Why isn't this priced in already?'
My brother you are an intern your career is not even priced in yet.
You are correct and I will concede to that, and to your experience. However I just shared some personal experiences and how my limited experience and personal learning and reading contributed to a world-view that I definitely didn't hold before foraging into finance. I also made sure to put up a tag that doesn't mislead others about my experience, so people can take what I say with a grain of salt
Yes, in several ways. First, I can't help myself from viewing almost every interaction as a transaction in some way; that is, what does a person / business / other stand to gain in different situations and what are the incentives. It is almost a universal truth that nothing ever happens "for free", even if the value being exchanged is intangible. Second, I think my temperament has improved and I've become less reactive to things, particularly bad news. Whereas before I was quick to turn things into a blame game, now my immediate thought is how to fix / address problems. Last, and maybe most important, I am perfectly ok with being wrong on things and changing my mind, even on the fly, when learning new information.
Edit: The question was how has this affected your personality. I'd say I've become a more relaxed person, but to be clear that doesn't mean I don't feel stress, etc.
I’ve become more judgmental, skeptical, and restless.
Serious or you're just being funny?
Serious in a cynical way?
40% of the PMs I know are jaded, other 40% are narcissitic, maybe there’s a 20% that’s ‘normal.’
I’m in the jaded camp.
Gonna be blunt. It doesn't change most people for the better. It's typical for people over the course of their career to go from an empathetic and easy-going personality to a high-strung, demanding, curt, narcissistic, conceited personality. To be clear - these are negative traits...
It happens to everyone. Part of it is the stress of the job but part of it is just bad role models for juniors. They emulate what they see.
I try to keep my outside life separate, so I can truly context switch and not be that guy who brings these qualities into their personal relationships.
Yes, Ive become a cynic.
I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg re: curiosity and skepticism. I was a ‘conspiracy theorist’ well before the job. Nothing more frustrating than watching people disregard factual info / alternative views, than to be proven wrong, than to ignore it and call you a ‘conspiracy theorist’ again the next time you counter the consensus. I also did a Congress internship and those people are WAY worse than the hedge fund folk. Now I’m short-focused analyst and I get resources to do investigations for the sole purpose of trying to be right (vs anything political/agenda-driven like journalists, politicians or intelligence analysts).
I like that it’s an objective scorecard - so when the ‘crazy conspiracy’ comes thru and people either ignore it or say ‘oh it was obvious to everyone’ there’s a record to point to.
Personality wise I don’t think the job has changed much. I do notice that I (internally not externally) get a lot more frustrated when getting slow/lazy/careless service. Dealing with the sell side you get used to fast/effective responses - but I have to remind myself, that service costs millions in commissions and it’s totally reasonable for the general contractor or checkout clerk to give less of a f*** about doing a good job, which really just reflects differences in incentive structure rather than character or capability.
I have seen people get douchier, but plenty others are great folks
Yes, made me more paranoid and far more analytical about everything
I’m not sure if it’s a good thing frankly but every high performing job changes you in some way
I’d add something that stood out to me when I interned at fund, the 40+ year old PMs and others were surprisingly fluent in a broad range of trends-of-the-day, and I was impressed that they knew a little about a lot including things my 19 year old self was interested in - like emerging music streaming, video game consoles and all this other random stuff. I think the most positive ‘social’/‘personality’ influence and is that I often know a little about alot and can relate to a lot of people. I’m pretty careful not to ever be the ‘talks about work’ guy, but if someone wants to talk to me about their work at a dinner party or whatever, it’s nice to know a little something about most industries. Friedman in Lexus and Olive Tree framed it as hedge funds are an example of ‘generalists’ in a world that increasingly specializes into narrower and narrower expertise
Yeah that aspect is great, but there is growing evidence that specialists will outperform. Bruce Greenwald of Columbia Business School strongly advises in favor of specialization - by location or sector.
Funds full of specialists may outperform, but as an investor yourself generalists will have a better carrer. Also the benefits of specialization can really only be robustly measured at large and well resourced funds and tend to be higher turnover/market neutral so I highly doubt there’s any robust accurate study showing that
I love what he says. If I understand him correctly, Greenwald argues in favour of specialization due to his framework of valuation: (in order of most conservative to most optimistic) asset-based valuation, earnings power valuation, franchise value.
Especially for ABV, it's a no-brainer why specialists have the advantage he's talking about. Only specialists, say an industrials analyst, know the price that certain PPE on the balance sheet would sell for on the open market, or how much a competitor would pay for that PPE. He argues for such a conservative, present framework of valuation cuz forecasting into the future is too assumptive. Not that the 2 frameworks can't be combined.
Other people have said different things, of course. Bill Nygren has always said that generalist analysts transition better to PM which is obviously true
You see it in every career. I came from medicine and all med students and residents talk about it medicine.
Now in finance all people talk about is markets.
It’s not just in finance.
Working in investing is a net negative for one's personality. From what I've observed when you're in it long enough, it turns a lot of people into self-interested out of touch assholes. Working in my field of finance made me not like finance people. Too much arrogance there.
I 100% became a lot more boring...
Also has to do with my girlfriend probably lol
LOL. It’s fascinating so many hedge fund guys, including the introverted ones, can get girlfriends easily. The money helps for sure, so does the status, but I feel it’s limited to cities like NYC and London - like the girls are just wired to think OMG when they hear a guy works at a “hedge fund.” Go to any other city in the world and it doesn’t have near as much the cache, even if it pays as well.
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