Note Taking at Hedge Funds
I personally attend a ton of meetings with the sell side, buy side, management, channel work and think taking great / clear notes is monetize able. Any tricks you guys use to take good notes? I tend to write down what I hear and then send raw notes with a bullet summary at top of my objective takeaways. I try not to interpret anything or provide my own view until discussions later to try and keep myself out of the process.
I do the same!
With a pen?
Yes
Get yourself a pen that transcribes notes onto a computer
I feel like when I write the notes with my hand and put the relevant comments back into my virtual notes, it helps me think through and form views. After the meeting, I usually haven’t digested anything to form views. That happens later.
Then you can’t write with a montblanc…
Has anyone had good experiences with automatic transcription software ("AI") for Zoom/WebEx/etc. meetings?
bump
Surprised you aim to "keep yourself out of the process", most people are eager to interpret and weigh into the decision making. Otherwise you're a glorified recorder, rather than an analyst?
I try and remain as neutral as possible so I don’t let my previous biases in but especially when you’re the primary question-asker, how do you not form views and steer the conversation?
Most people would argue it's your job to steer the conversation. To have a sense of where to probe, where the change in trend might be revealed, where consensus might be wrong. In all honesty it feels like you're mistaking avoiding bias with "avoid forming an opinion", which is limitting your potential value-add.
I don't know how junior or senior you are, but you should understand PMs are swamped with info and they are looking for their analysts to screen, prioritize, analyze, and lead to conclusions. I would find it extremely annoying for an analyst of mine to just produce raw notes where the PM is consistently expected to do all the thinking.
Couple years in, have some P&L responsibility. I always go into meetings with a game plan/question list and often it’s to try and convince myself I’m wrong (break down bias especially for names that I’m biased to like/dislike). I definitely steer the conversation to either alter my view going in or gain confidence, it’d be a waste of my time otherwise. I probably take too much time sending my takeaways, outside of big-reveal, thesis-changing headliners that I send instantaneously, because I hate sending half-baked thoughts, was the one in the room and to your point, just lobbing contextless notes to my PM isn’t a good use of his time or what he pays me for.
You know your PMs style so if it’s working keep at it? But I tend to agree with above poster that sending raw notes without clear takeaways in the interest of being “unbiased” isn’t ideal. There is a trade off but speed is so important esp if it’s a small group meeting or investor day or whatever bc as they say markets moving.
A PM I respect told me he basically wants to hear when
1.) confirms thesis
2.) appears to invalidate thesis
3.) update if there is particular item he has keen focus on or we have a disagreement on (I’m macro but basically imagine if I was sanguine on margins and he was concerned on them he’d want a quick recap of this)
4.) absolute or relative value targets/stops hit
They will definitely come to you if they need more so be prepared but communication should be user friendly bc if not they’ll just call up som sellside folks they trust which is no bueno for you. You are still early in career so don’t despair but if you know your names/thesis well this should be pretty easy to do. Honestly spending time to think while typing up hand written notes is so 2005 single manager with 6 positions. Good luck
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