is it a good idea to include how much profit you made in personal portfolio?

A headhunter is referring me to a L/S investment analyst role at a HF and asked me to write a few bullet points in an email (which the recruiter will then forward onto the PM at the HF) summarising why i want this role and why they should hire me.. to help me stand out to the PM.

I want to try stand out as I've managed to grow my own portfolio from $100k to around $2m over the past 5 years. Would writing a line saying:
- Strong track record of fundamental research evidently shown by successfully growing my personal portfolio to over $2m

Ofc I would expand on it a bit but would this be a good idea? or is it cringey to say this and potentially bad to expose my personal finances to them? 

27 Comments
 

100k to 2m in 5 years requires massive portfolio concentration and very high risk levels. As a recruiter I would automatically assume that the result was achieved mainly through luck instead of skill. So unless you did it in a L/S fashion with decent risk limits (which on first sight I would assume is almost impossible), I am not sure how helpful the information would be.

 

@ the person who threw MS. Then please explain to me how an average annual return of 82% is supposed to be sustainable over a long time in an equity L/S setting without taking massive concentrated risks and a good portion of luck? Even if such a strategy would exist, it would never scale to a large sized portfolio. There simply would not be enough capacity... and achieving those returns by just being long levered crypto does not really tell me anything about your L/S skills as a recruiter...

 

This is, in fact, the real problem: scale. It is not feasible to go from 1 billion to 20 billion at that rate of return with low risk, but it is certainly possible to go from 100k to 2 million at that rate of return with low risk and without being highly concentrated or lucky (risk scales non-linearly and the market impact at the 100k to 2 million level is very low). 

That said, it is probably better not to add this result in a written document, because it is not directly valuable to a large-scale portfolio, but you could mention and explain this during an interview if you get the chance to say so.

 

Don’t do this, doesn’t really show transferable skills. Being net long on good names is very different to the type of research needed to run a market neutral/factor neutral portfolio. Just shows you don’t understand the idiosyncratic part of a stocks return curve, the bit you’re paid to find.

Particularly if this is for a pod

 

What if historical volatility is not a true representation of reality ? 

 
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