Launching: The Long and The Short of It
A Substack for Hedge Fund Investors
Welcome, friends, to The Long and The Short of It.
I’ve been around markets long enough to see a lot, do a lot and learn a lot as a Wall Street analyst and senior hedge fund executive, and now it’s my turn to share insights and humor to give your long/short game a lift.
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you’ll gain access to weekly articles and useful data written for investors, rising talent, and leaders. I’ve got you covered for how to get yourself off and running, getting better at making the donuts, and making a good firm great. There will be plenty of content on today’s essential ingredient, integrating technology and data into process, too. By subscribing, you’ll also have exclusive access to monthly podcasts and survey data collected from you, the readers, focusing on the most pressing questions and developments facing our industry.
Learn more about me here, or read below for a taste of what’s to come.
A Fantasy Football Player’s Guide to Picking Stocks
#investors
As I ponder what life would be like if Mahomes QB’d the Giants (happy, very happy!), I need to channel my inner football to something useful. Here, Fantasy Football strategy meets analysts’ decisions. A terms overview for the newer investors with just plain good practices for the more seasoned investor.
This note decodes a few helpful processes used by experienced hedge fund professionals to think about selecting stocks and making money. It simply requires a base understanding of a few market-nerd terms worth explaining and defining, such as “alpha,” “shorting,” and “factors.” And correspondent to these, there is an entire world of fundamental investment research to consider. To better convey how and why it all works, I’ll use fantasy football-type terminology that many of us (>50million US players per Fantasy Sports and Gaming association) will find familiar. In the end, the stats posted in your leagues and on your teams by the likes of Derrick Henry, Justin Jefferson or Patrick Mahomes may not be all that different from stock action in AAPL, TSLA or KO.
The stock market is very much a fair play game. Investors have a publicly available set of data on many companies and use these to identify opportunities in “the market.” Additionally, the people that run these companies (i.e., management) are highly analogous to coaches running a team. And the people analyzing the business value and prospects professionally (“sell-side” analysts, CNBC talking heads) are not unlike the many pundits on TV, podcasts, etc…