The vast majority of people are very easy to analyse. The trick is to pay zero attention to what they say, and pay all the attention to what they do. This is why in-person meetings still remain so valuable, as it is much easier to work out what is motivating them in person, that via zoom. The irony of this approach is that it fails on the person we spend the most time with - ourselves. How often do we tell ourselves we need to go to the gym, or lose weight, or study harder, or read book, when in the end we just doom scroll Tiktok instead. That’s because we are obsessed with what we SHOULD do, and we try and convince ourselves we should do it, when we know that we really want to do is watch another cute cat or dog video. And of course we then go into denial, and try and rationalise our “bad” behaviour away. This is plainly obvious to people on the outside - but somehow lost on ourselves.
Why the philosophical introduction? I gave back money and closed the fund I was running in 2021, and have been writing this substack ever since. It is easy to rationalise from a financial perspective - assets had fallen, I had had a few bad years in the market, and my investment theories (particularly in currency markets) were not working anymore. But that was just excuses I think. I just didn’t want to spend my time managing money anymore. I much preferred spending time with my family, and particularly with my boys. In 2021, they would have been 10 and 7, and the older one was starting to get very serious with his motorsport and the younger with football and cricket. Now in 2025, both boys are going to be in high school (senior school), and both are starting to be men. They both don’t need me to be present in the same way - in fact they both need me to give them the space they need to grow into men. What that means is that this era where I am working from home, spending time with the family, and weekends at sports event all over Europe is coming to an end. Not straight away, but the taper is beginning, I will go from seeing my boys most of the time to just some of the time. And that’s a good thing - as a parent I want our boys to find their own way in life.
I think one of the reasons that I gave back money was that I had ideas on how to turn things around but I knew that it would require the same “nose to the grindstone effort” I had put in from the ages of 25 to 40 to get going again. On some subconscious level, I think I knew I could not do what I wanted to do with my family and with my work life, and so I choose family life. And now, with my family commitments beginning to drop off, I have the bandwidth again. The biggest tell that I am switched on again is that I have started to read investment bank research again! I don’t read this research for opinions but looking for cold hard interesting data points - like panning for gold in a sea of computer generated verbiage. Good, interesting research is vanishingly hard to find - even most “macro armchair thinkers” tend to be pushing some agenda, so the outcome of their “research” is already pre-ordained. I have a friend who keeps asking me to watch Michael Saylor research - but why would I, when I already know the conclusion will be” buy Bitcoin” no matter what point he starts from. Gold bugs fall in the same “pointless to read” bucket. But despite this, I have begun to read research again - which to me is my subconscious starting to warm up the engine of thinking and investing again ( it will almost certainly means I will also get fat again - as reading and thinking makes me snack).
One investing observation that I had back in 2016 or so, which could well have been the basis of running a hedge fund was the observation that most hedge funds (long short equity) are run in a very inefficient basis. Now that I have the energy for it, I think I may try and see what I can do with this observation.
