HF Mindset and Psychology

Hey everyone. I’m a Non-target senior who has an internship in ER at a MM bank this summer. Eventually my goal is to make it into the buy side and a lot of my self-learning has been directed toward that. I was wondering how do you step away from straight-lined Investment philosophy and thought processes and gear toward thinking outside of the box thinking, using alternative data, etc.

Did you train your mindset to think this way? Was it from mentorship? Pure experience in the industry? And how should I go about shifting mindset to more abstract thinking? Any good book recommendations or podcasts on this stuff? Thanks.

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Dude you know as well as I do that is relevant to long-only mindset at best.

For the hedge fund mindset, go read When the Wolves Bite, about Icahn and Ackman and their battle over Herbalife. Two Masters of the Universe, battling it out over diametrically opposed high conviction ideas and huge egos... Also, there a few fictional books that get it right too. DM me OP if interested

Big4 Audit --> TMT L/S
 
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Did any of you guys or gals play team sports in high school or college? The day-to-day at an HF, in my view, requires a higher level of "game-night" intensity and communication that occurs in squads and teams on a day-to-day basis.

There is much more at stake on any given day, mainly due to stricter risk limits as well as comparison to peers, amongst other reasons.

HF: Everyday is Day One.

 

Once breathing becomes a skill, it can be used like a rheostat for your heart rate. There is a reciprocal relationship between the rate at which you breathe and the rate at which the heart pumps. When breathing with long, deep breaths you produce a mood of calmness where the heart is at rest and the heart rate is slowed down. However if you speed breathing up (or stop breathing), you also speed up the heart rate. As the heart begins to beat harder and faster, an alarm is triggered in the survival brain and it triggers to fight or flight. An emotional hijacking (and a bad trade) is in progress. This, in combination with your cutting off your air supply to the brain, leads the primitive survival brain to overwhelm the thinking brain and become a runaway freight train. This is not conducive to successful trading

         ---- Trading like a sniper 3rd edition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDs2FtiPkw
 

Abstract thinking isn’t valuable in HF world. You need to know how others think, you need to read people, you need to have a pulse on what’s priced into a stock, understand the human need for a narrative, and be able to identify when that narrative is about to change.

What’s helpful in investing broadly is recombination. Ie ripping something apart, reassembling it, do that 1,000 times to 250 different objects, and seeing these things for their underlying substrate vs. the packaging.

TLDR: break things, put them back together again, and realize that the innards of all these objects are largely the same. Pattern recognition.

 

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