KNOWING WHO YOU ARE

I must say I am really happy that I have been able to keep some momentum going on this blog whilst I am hurting with my positions.

In life we are often placed in akward positions that define who or what we should be to satisfy the maximum number of stakeholders, but not who we really are. Unfortunatelty this same force called life, comes back and tests our ability in the new circumstances we often find ourselves in.

What am I trying to say? Let me bring it down to my case as a fund manager and one can easily extrapolate this further into ones own life.

I am trying to raise money for my funds I manage so that my business can become successful.

Now there are different types of investors who will help me get there. I want to just focus on the one type which is your institutional investor. They invest large sums of money and can take me to my destination very quickly. The problem for me is that there requirements are at odds with my style. So as many have suggested to me over the years, adapt your style.

I wish it was so easy the problem is that my track record and confidence is built along the lines of a more proprierty capital/trading fund type approach and therefore a switch even if it is just lowering the leverage in line with an institutional mandate is still not the same. So while on paper it may seem easy to adapt to something that will ensure one component of success, i.e. funds under management, the problem is with this success often comes the failure to perform as a fund manager under the new criteria you have adapted to, which really is failure if you examine the essence of what we are trying to achieve in this business.

So yes one could reach the goal of having a business that makes money even though your performance is poor because unfortunately the correlation between performance and FUM is not as strong as the marketing people would like you to believe.

Coming back to knowing who I am; over the years I have developed a distinct approach to managing money. I do not plan to change this approach even if it will cost me raising money in the short term. Call this idealistic as I have been called this before. The point is that in order for me to feel comfortable and truthful I need to stay true to the system that I believe in. I have found in the early to middle part of managing this fund as the statistics were producing numbers that were really placing the fund in a special place I was falling more and more in love with something that I am not.

I do not produce symmetrical returns
I risk appropriate amounts of capital to make large returns
I am not scared to stick with a position as it gets more and more out of favour

In the long run I know this will make my funds money and in so doing it will hopefully make my business very profitable. This journey called life needs to be lived on a level that inspires life, too many people myself included live life according to what our circumstances dictate and this leads to life being sucked from us. It is time to be courageous and not allow others to dictate but rather live life according to what you know is true to life.