Running Your Own Race
You know the calculation. An opportunity comes up, and before you've thought much about the work itself, you're already running the following calculation. How it sounds, who will be impressed. how it reads on the CV in five years.
That calculation is not vanity. A bigger platform buys optionality, and a stronger name buys mobility. When you can't see far down the road, visible credentials are how you keep your options open. That is a rational answer to real uncertainty.
Early in my career I watched an analyst turn down an offer from a marquee name firm. I thought he was making a mistake.
He was mid-career, with the track record to justify the move. He chose a boutique instead, run by a portfolio manager whose investment philosophy he'd spent months studying. From the outside it looked like a step sideways. He'd simply done the sequencing most people skip. He knew what kind of investor he wanted to become before he chose where to become it.
What the platform could not have handed him was conviction. You cannot sustain an investment philosophy through a drawdown if you borrowed it. A position down twenty per cent in a sceptical market needs a thesis you actually believe, built on an edge you understand as your own.
In investment, everyone will tell you they think independently. The screens and the annual reports are the same for everyone. And yet real differentiation in most teams is narrower than the culture suggests. Being different usually means a five to ten per cent variance on near-term estimates. The big conviction call, two to five years out, is rarer than anyone admits. Not because the insight is missing, but because the pull to stay within a recognisable distance of consensus is real, even when nobody names it.
What I'd read as a mistake was a decision made on criteria I couldn't see.
This week's ROE Letter goes deeper into what it costs when you let the environment decide your direction for you.
https://substack.com/@charmianlong
When you last made a major career decision, were you choosing the vehicle or choosing the direction?