I can remember how I used to spot the CEO of the bank I worked for walking onto the trading floor heading towards me and my colleagues. We were managing the banks proprietary cash and I quickly realized that he never made the trip when we were making money, his trips from the hallowed executive wing were saved for those days when we lost money. Let me say he wasn’t good company on those days. A typical greeting would be a heavy slap on the back and the following rhetorical question, “Michael why did you lose my money?” I don’t know what the practise is at other investment banks but at our bank each traders PnL was distributed in a daily email to senior management, all the traders, the treasury accountants and risk managers. There was nowhere to hide.
I know a guy who manages a billion dollar fund who used to tell me that when he had a poor month, he would hold the release of client statements until the last possible moment in the hope that the next month would be more favourable and he would then send both statements simultaneously. When I ran managed accounts for high net worth’s, I was notorious for sending out performance briefings in quick succession on setting new high water marks; however, these reports became all too sparse when in drawdown. Not only was my behaviour embarrassingly obvious but the amount of extra stress I was placing on myself debating should I or shouldn’t I send out my performance was so unnecessary.
There was method to the madness of the investment bank I worked at by openly displaying our PnL; it simply put the reality out there for those involved to see. It took away those awkward, seemingly nosey questions, “hey how your doing this month mate?” and it also takes away those energy sapping internal questions of deciding when to release your performance results working to your own subjectively biased schedule. We see this self-reporting bias evident in all the performance database platforms including ours.
RAPA as well as other platforms offer the ability to have your performance updated daily. I can highly recommend that you opt for an option where you can have your performance reported regularly and objectively by a 3rd party; releasing you from the natural human bias of wanting to hide bad performance for as long as you can. There is nowhere to hide so opt for objective reporting transparency and set yourself free.
Regards,
Michael Berman, Ph.D.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together
CEO & Co-Founder
www.rapacapintro.com
