How do I stop getting news fatigue in this job?
I am a junior research associate at a HF (ignore title) and part of my job is keeping track of macro news. This includes headlines and exec orders relevant to our portfolio. However, I’m really starting to get headline fatigue given these tariffs and counter tariffs and executive orders are changing by the hour. I keep track of the major ones but I wasn’t keeping track of everything coming out of Truth Social and I got flak from a senior on my team today for not know what the effective tariff rates would be on some Chinese med tech if tariffs were imposed during a team meeting. My issue with being always plugged in on the news is that it’s harder for me to focus on deep thinking and modeling - also so much of this feels like meaningless noise to me.
How do you guys stop your brain from “turning off” from this incessant flood of headlines? I’m told I’m doing a great job at my role but the one thing I hate is keeping track of these always changing news headlines.
Welcome to the industry
Can I have your job?
consider it a tax (tariff) for getting to be at that seat and get experience in the hf industry, in hopes you get to manage your risk one day
That’s the neat part, you don’t!
Can epitomize with the volatility. Curious how you got this gig and what your prior background was?
Meh as a junior you aren’t getting paid to do “deep thinking,” whether that be on idea generation or newsflow or modeling. You are largely viewed as a chunk of meat who can do the annoying parts of the job that your seniors don’t have time to do because they are more focused on the other aspects of the job. It’s the same in many other industries (medicine and law being the best examples, but also finance as well; the analyst/assoc isn’t paid to do strategic thinking)
The sad part about this is that if you don’t do the menial tasks well now, you might not get a chance to do some of the deeper, more meaningful work that you want to do. Gotta earn people’s trust somehow, even if it’s painful going through it. Most of us got through this phase just fine, so can you. The important thing is that you stay interested in the long game…whether that means being more clued in to how others at your firm do their jobs or networking with seniors who tell you what they work on. otherwise, that’s how you burn out
Nothing super insightful to add, except do your best to be pro-active vs. re-active. Do you have a schedule of what is upcoming (for as much of the stuff that can be known ahead of time vs. suprise news)?
Do you have a structured process for coalescing this information to make sure you don't miss anything? Do you keep it in a structured format that is easy to update and read each time? How do you differentiate between important and noise and distill down to information that is actually useful vs. just automatically blasting whatever comes across your screen so you hit the check mark on your job?
Seems like a pain in the ass for something miniscule I know, but the job today is to make the PM's life easier with actionable and stock moving information. Always put yourself in the shoes of who you are delivering the work to, regardless if something feels impossible to keep up with or analyze fully.
Something early in my career that helped was taking an "ownership" mentality. I know its disgusting corporate talk, but bear with me. Imagine you owned a fund and needed this job done. How would you like the job to be done for you? How do you ensure its being completed well? Of course there is a mountain of meaningless news, that's why the job is being asked.
Some days I feel like I accomplished nothing because it was straight re-active, ingesting news, and fleeting thoughts on random things. Once you get ahead of some of this and can distill what matters, it leaves more room to actually add value.
Sell side report that downgrades PT by $2 based on new ERP because macro is falling off a cliff - fairly pointless. Sell side report that was a channel check showing decreased ad spend in the quarter... well a bit more important to know about.
You can't if your team has that style.
When it's your pod / business, you can pick a less lame style.
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