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Cameron Hight

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98

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2018-03-12

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2018-03-12

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1

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1. “Well, as you know, I am a podcast junkie. So I probably get more out of the stuff I listen to than the stuff I read. I do. I read a lot of books that you would see on reading lists that you're aware of. But my favorites are podcasts that I listen to long.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Do a job properly or don't do it at all. If you can't figure out how to do it properly, find out how to do it. If you can't find out, do something else because you're wasting your time. In the Flynn household, half-assed jobs were not allowed. And I result work that way myself. I have very high standards. It does mean that, you know, people have to work quite hard at attention. But mistakes are allowed. They're just not to be repeated. And laziness is not allowed.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Or they look at what happened just before you entered, what happened just before you kicked the ball, and what happened just after you kicked the ball, what happened to you and what happened to the ball. And that kind of analysis, I think, led them to have an advantage. And it also helped them to recruit talent, you know, in the money ball style that was cheaper that nobody else was paying attention to that ended up winning the day. It was a huge deal in the UK and it was one of those sort of underdog winning heartfelt stories.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “My favorite sports moment is any moment where the underdog wins because they use data. Moneyball, great. You know, I love Moneyball. That formed a big part of my thinking in Accenture. But probably my favorite, most recent one would be when Leicester City won the Premier League again in the UK. I guess it was a couple years ago now, but they had been nowhere. They had been third division not of interest to anybody really and had only entered the Premier League a year before that. And they were literally a 5,000 to 1 shot. And yet they won. And there's lots of theories about why that is, but one of the central ones that comes up over and over is that they cared about data science and they had players logging data on their tablets and they did a lot of analysis that was quite like what we do around entries and exits and ads.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Will never be willing to do it. So, I mean, I see managers, it's like I look at x-rays all day long of different managers, and I see a lot of skill. It's quite rare that I see somebody where you're like, oh God, you should really find a different occupation. Usually there's something to work with, and then it's all about how do I help that person do more of the thing they're good at and stop getting in their own way on those other things.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I'm very optimistic. Charlie Ellis is a non-exec director of my company. There are plenty of people in my life who feel the opposite, except even Charlie would say, I never said there wouldn't be active managers. I said there would be fewer of them. And so I'm very optimistic for the few that will go on. And a lot of active managers will leave because it is getting so much harder to have a competitive advantage. But the ones who have behavioral alpha advantage, you know, where they actually are looking at their own behavior and saying, I want to continuously improve like an athlete, and I want to look at data to help me do that. low hanging fruit there even just putting them against other fund managers there's low hanging fruit and and all it takes is the will to face the truth about like mankind needs to be honest with itself about what works and what doesn't work and what is true and what is not true and if you're willing to do that you do have an advantage some people”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “So now that you've looked at all these data sets, mostly in the equity world, we know how hard it is already to just beat the market by picking stocks. We're compounding that with the individual behavioral biases that don't help. As you looked at all the data, you've worked with some teams to improve what they're doing, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about active management?”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “The most logical starting point for us will be futures because a lot of equity managers, trade futures also. That's relatively straightforward. The things that make futures complicated are more operational than anything else. There's a ton of demand from fixed income. And fixed income is very interesting because it's an area where active management, there's a strong argument for active management continuing to add value. And we'd love to address it. The hard part is figuring out how you judge a good fixed income decision. typically I'm buying it because I think it's going up or I'm shorting it because I think it's going down and it might be a relative value thing but at the end of the day that's how it works. Fixed income you're buying something it's like you're throwing something into a witch's brew and it's you buy it because it's going to do something to the bigger brew and that could be a lot of different things. We're sort of taking a step back and looking at it more fundamentally and saying on a second is there a simpler”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Love them dearly, but they're like, Claire, don't even tell me about this. I don't want to know. I've been doing it the same way for 25 years. And if I lift the lid on it now, God help me. And it's like, you know what? Fine. I'm not going to try and sell to you. But I am going to find out who the young person on your team is who's really, you know, the next gen. And I'm going to sell to that person. And then also I'm going to give it a champion of just talking to a client this morning where very old school long only firm that the head of research is really into it. But he's like, you know, how do I get buy-in? I need your help getting buy-in. And been through this so many times now that we can see exactly what we're dealing with and know how to just, it's like a Kaizen approach. Very small, very slow. It takes a while.”

   2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I'd say every team has at least one person who's into this kind of thing. You know, there's always that person. And often there's somebody in the head of equities or the CIO role who loves this idea and is like, you know, we need data-driven feedback so we know how to allocate our energy and we want to prove it in our marketing material that we're skilled and blah, blah, blah. There will sometimes be one guy who's really struggling on performance and that's the one that they decide that we're going to do a pilot with that's not a good plan. Unfortunately, if you are going to do that, also have to do it with somebody who's doing well because that guy's under a lot of pressure already. He knows he's performing badly. He may or may not take well to having yet more noses in his business. Then you also will have people who are just never going to be up for it. You know, a lot of my old colleagues from back in the day,”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Because you can't remember all this stuff all the time, you know, if you can just know that the tech is going to prompt you to make a decision when you need to make it, that's what the tech is good at. You're good at making the decision. So he's actually asking for more nudges at this point. He's like, great, I buy it. I know this works. Give me more. You know, show me my sales position. Show me my alpha decay. Show me anything where you've noticed that I tend to make a lazy or sort of unconscious and negative decision.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “You will start doing what you used to do because it's like, you know, it's very inbuilt and you've been doing it for years like that. So we have seen it happen where a client put a lot of focus on an insight that we brought him. It was to do actually in his case with Exitiming. And he started to improve. And that was great. And then he moved on to something else and forgot all about the exit timing discipline and reverted. And so we came back again and said, look, everything else is looking good, but that old exit timing thing has creeped back in should we have another look at it. And this time he was like, okay, this is my number one. 2017 is all about self-discipline. We are doing this. And he has killed it. He has completely changed his behavior. And he knows that, unfortunately, you can't then relax. But that's why technology nudging you may eat.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “What's fascinating and sort of unexpected to me having analyzed a lot of different portfolio managers data going back long periods of time in some cases is that people's behavior is very stable. So people will often say, well, I want you to go back 10 years because I think my behavior might have changed through different market cycles or whatever. And the reality is that we each have our dance moves and it doesn't matter what music's playing or what dance floor we're on, we still do the same dances. And some of those moves are awesome. You're really cool. And some of them are really embarrassing. And you saw yourself in a mirror, you would stop doing that. But if you take the, so I can show you the mirror and we could talk about like, okay, you might not want to do it quite like that, you know, you make a decision about what you're going to do differently. But when we take the mirror away.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Once you've done a whole bunch of work with the portfolio manager or a firm I'm kind of curious how consistent are the patterns and if they are consistent and someone learns, oh, I tend to exit too early, I tend to exit too late, after a while, are they able to just embed that in their own process and change? And therefore, in some sense, you've done a nice service and they don't need you anymore.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Some people, anyway, and for the first firm that we did this with, that was the case, which was, and particularly around, so when they would vote unanimously on something, it was fine if they all trusted management. So there was like a link between management quality and unanimity, and that resulted in a good outcome, whereas if you didn't have that management quality agreement and it was contentious, you were more likely to end up with a good outcome. So that's just like the beginning. There's something about that healthy debate that everybody talks about in their marketing, and it's hard to do. It's way harder than people let on. But doing that in a way that it doesn't get personal because you can see that the value that healthy debate adds is quantifiable and it's positive. It just means that you can do that much more freely.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “The ones that are most interesting so far are ones where they're capturing a lot of data about the entry context. So we've decided to buy this name and we're reporting. What was Joe's view? What was Fred's view? What was Jane's view? Was this contentious? Was it unanimous? How did it fit on management quality and valuation and franchise, all the different things that you might be rating these things on anyway as part of your process? If we can get you to do that in a structured data format, then we can start to weave that into the analysis. And what we found so far is sometimes contentious decisions are the better decisions.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I imagine once you start recording data, it's trade entry data and exit data. Now you start adding in these asking nudges, which is a whole different sort of data set. What's the most interesting data set that a portfolio manager has tried to get your help in assessing how they can improve their performance?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “It's a question of how many trades, really. And we look for a minimum of 2,000 trades. So that could be adds and trends. It doesn't have to be that you were in and out of names that frequently. But for somebody who's very low turnover, that could be quite a long time. And for somebody whose long short trader, that could be a month. If we think that you're not going to have enough data for that, but you're still interested in nudges, for example, we have a version of essentially called Ascension Out that is basically for people who don't have enough data yet, but want to start capturing more about why.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Exactly, exactly. And then we can measure what happens, like what trades do you do on the back of that and how successful are they? And what we find is that they are more successful than your normal trades usually. That's very interesting. And that's how we end up proving our ROI, because at that point, I think we helped you save this much alpha.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “And what we find is that people's behavior changes. So when you do that, people do make a better decision. And it's not because we've told them what decision to make. It's because we've told them to pause and make a decision, whatever that decision is. You're the book manager, but this is the point where your unconscious bias would lead you to ignore the situation or try and think about something else. And we're saying, no, you know what? It's not nice, but you have to think about it now. So let's just do it. And then we measure it.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Going forward, how about we send you this nudge and it's going to list the positions? It's going to tell you how many weeks in a row. The name is on this list. And it's going to remind you what the optimal point was historically. But we're not telling you you have to sell or buy. We're just saying make a decision, click this link, and it's going to ask you a couple of questions. And you can say what the questions are, but it might be, would I be a buyer today? Or why are you still here? Or the things that you know you're supposed to be asking yourself at that point, but it's sort of inconvenient and it never ends up happening.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Well, it could be about exit timing. So it could be if you've had a tendency to hold on to lose for too long, what we can do is say, all right, here's what could be a stop-loss rule, sort of standard if the name underperforms by a certain amount without recovering by a certain amount. Let's apply that historically every name in your portfolio and then let's backtest it and see at what point would you have been optimal in making a decision? And that decision could be to add.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “But the point is if you mention the stock, whatever you say next is going to get pinned to the share price chart. And in that way, you can kind of dump your brain directly into a visual story of each idea as opposed to into a pile of notebooks that gathers stuff in a corner. So telling nudges are really about looking, so we get your daily praise and holdings, you know, once we've done that historical analysis, if you sign up for the full insight service, take your daily trades and holdings. And based on the patterns we've observed in your behavior historically, we will send you a nudge once a week that says, here are the names you're currently holding that look like they're doing that, whatever that is. What's an example?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “How long do you think you'll be here? What is your target price? You get to choose what the questions are because it doesn't work if the questions aren't relevant to you. You drop it like immediately if we just ask you bog standard questions. So it has to be that these are things you said you wanted to ask yourself because you know that down the road you want to be able to do analysis on whether we're better at this type of trade or that type or do we ever really make it to a price target or do we hold it twice as long as we think we're going to all of that sort of question those are things that we can answer if we start capturing the data at the point that you enter the position we'll ask you for some people we have that they answer every night it's just journaling prompt and it says what happened today might ask you a few questions about how productive were you or whatever what names are you thinking about what are you thinking about them and that's the information you can keep to yourself”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “We have asking nudges and telling nudges. And the point of all of it is that there's too much information already out there. You can't expect anybody to actually pull anything in this day to day. Fund managers want to be served stuff. Ideally, they want to be disciplined, but they're not going to remember to do that. It's very rare that you find somebody who remembers to journal every night and do it exactly like this and, you know, do it in some way that's actually analyzable. I mean, even the best journalers are writing in a paper notebook a lot of the time, which is not helpful beyond the act of writing it down, really. Or it is, but it's very time consuming to go back over it. So what asking nudges do is they're triggered by a passing of time or an event in the portfolio, and they ask you questions. You just entered this name. Why did you do that?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, you mentioned your nudges, and I know we've talked about this in the past, and it's something that I found really interesting. And really the second part of what we started talking about. So you now have the data, you've now figured out some things, the portfolio manager maybe could do a little bit better. What are these nudges”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “We have clients who do huge amounts of turnover as well. And those guys, they're doing, I don't know, 100 trades a day maybe. They're not going to answer a nudge to ask them questions about why they're doing what they're doing is a question of packaging the output of the analysis with a human machine combo. The human is an ex-fund manager and that exponentager comes and sits down with you and gets to know what your process is like and what your attention is like and what you're really looking to get out of it and then tailor the service accordingly because if you don't engage with it and you don't use the information the whole thing is pointless for us as much as for you”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “That is the hardest part, right? I mean, the math, I'm not saying I can do it, but there are lots of PhDs out there and very smart people who could do the math. The hard part is actually getting somebody to use the math to change their behavior. And different people are different. So we have some clients who are super low turnover, like, you know, very long term and very, very deliberate in their process and make very few decisions. And that means that analyzing the data is kind of slow going. You do it once. It's not going to change by next month, right? But those people are often the sort who are very interested in codifying the investment process and using our asking nudges, as we call them, to record more information about why they're doing what they're doing. And in that way, go deeper on a smaller number of data points.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “I'm also really curious about adoption. You mentioned that in certain instances you shine a mirror on someone's actual activity and their eyes might light up and say, whoa, wow, I've been doing that. How do you then get the behavior to change?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “In the hole. That is a fascinating area, I think. And it's not something that anybody's really done a lot of work on the industry. Something that we're digging quite deep into at the moment. And I think that will hopefully map to things like the victory effect and snake bite effect and that type of stuff.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “So we're always looking at things by hit rate, payoff, and impact on the portfolio. And then what those things are, we might be looking at the individual skills that you just mentioned. We might be looking at just overall positions, which ones by sector by country, by market cap, by liquidity, by a zillion other factors, which ones do we tend to get right most often and get most right? And then what we can do is if you give us data about whose ideas were these or which research sources were you using or what's your risk factor scores or conviction levels or anything like that, we can bring that into the mix and then you can hone it that much finer. And then we also will look at, and for this we don't really need any extra data, how do you behave when you're winning, when you're on a roll versus when you're”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “You start with a set of tools that looks at what stock to get into, how to get in, and at what pace trading around it when you're there, when do you get out, how do you get out or how fast you get out? And then the exit and potentially swap into something else. Are there other parts of the portfolio process that you're studying with the data that you gather on trading information?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Take, say, a three month run up. They're waiting and waiting, and then they start getting in and they've cut the top and showing that to them can be quite useful because they can work steps into the process that get them to ask questions of themselves. But are we too late?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “We've taken a practical approach and said, let's actually analyze what goes on. And then if there is a bias that we found in the literature that relates to this, great. And if there isn't, so be it. Maybe we will end up inventing new ones based on the events we're gathering. We definitely do sometimes see the disposition effect as an extension of the law diversion point. So not just holding on losers until losers are too long, but cutting winners early. And the odds of that thing benefiting the portfolio are greater than 50-50, which is overconfidence in its own way. So we see that from some people, but not others. You often see evidence of around entry timing and that sort of people are often very good at”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Up a mirror and show that to somebody, they're like, Oh God, okay, that's embarrassing. And the fact is it may be embarrassing, but there's no need to be embarrassed because everyone does it. So then it's about how can we help you not do that or not necessarily saying here's a stop loss you need to follow to always cut at a certain point, but rather to nudge you to just make a deliberate decision at this point. Here are three questions you've said you want to ask yourself at that point. Here they are, answer them. So it's leaving the power in the hands of the PM, which is really important. And, you know, I can appreciate having been a PM.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “You don't really appreciate it until you've seen your own exit timing in the mirror. And then what we're doing is saying, look, let's define what the exit decision is, you know. It could be about looking at just the last day of trading, like the last shares you let go of. Are you doing it early compared with what would have been optimal given a window of analysis that's relevant to you? Or are you doing it late or are you doing it exactly right? And what we find is that the vast majority of fund managers, not surprisingly, show evidence of loss aversion around exit timing when prices have been on a negative trend or a positive one if they're short. So when the price is moving against you, the tendency is to hold on for too long and often then to capitulate at the bottom. And when you sort of”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Analyze each type of decision separately and say, okay, well, Let's look at exit timing. Exit timing, every fund manager knows is hard. And every book tells you that it's hard. We all know it's hard. However,”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Well, it all comes down to what data we can get our hands on from a given portfolio manager. We start on the assumption that the very bare minimum we can get is historical daily trades and or holdings. That's the starting point. And with that, we can basically decompose every investment that you've ever made into a series of sub-decisions. No matter what you're doing, for any equity investment, you're making a picking decision, you're making an entry timing decision, you're making a decision about how big to go and how quickly to get there and adding and trimming decisions while you're in there, and then a set of decisions on the way out about how fast to get out and when to get out and what to switch into. And if you look at it that way and decompose every sort of investment story into those constituent parts, then you can”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah, let's break down those two components. So the first is there are behaviors that we know and sort of had a number of conversations the last couple of weeks about this with Michael Mobison and Annie Duke that get in our own way. And so how do you use data to get into the behaviors that are working and the behaviors that aren't?”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Bigger problems and we'll check it later. But we'll be here when you're ready to talk. Actually, what we find though is that there is a growing population of portfolio managers who have read a lot about behavioral finance, you know, who have taken an interest in this idea of bias and are aware that they have biases, but have never really been able to identify them or do anything about them. And so the pitch becomes about if you now have the ability to look in the mirror and see the truth about what is working, what is not working in data terms with no judgment, knowing that it's not going to be shown to other people. This isn't about embarrassing you. It's just about helping you. Wouldn't you do that? Why would you not do that? And if technology could then be used to remind you of what you've learned from these insights at the moment when”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Depends on who we're talking to, first of all. So if we're talking to a PM directly, pitch is, are you interested in using technology to do the best possible job you can? And if the answer is I don't care about doing the best possible job that I can, then...”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “You know, it's really to do with the cloud and virtual servers and big data analytics and machine learning, you know, the fact that you can use computing power on an ad hoc basis whenever you need it to do calculations just for as long as they're needed means you don't have to invest in massive infrastructure. And machine learning makes it possible to cut right to the chase on amongst all of this data, what are the top three insights I need to know? I don't have time to listen to chapter and verse. Just tell me what I need to know. That has made a huge difference.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Again, though, we couldn't provide that at that point. We didn't have the technology or the expertise to do the math that's required, really. Now we launch the Centaur almost five years ago now, and it was really to solve that problem that I could see even through the financial crisis, I was working for a fund where the manager didn't have doubts in his own ability or that no suspicion, I don't think that his skills had disappeared, but his investors had questions. His investors wanted to see, you know, just show me some kind of proof that everything is still working for you in the way that you would expect it to.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Totally different, if not unrelated, which was run a tech company that made portfolio management software for hedge funds. Through that experience, I saw that I was not the only one who wanted to understand how to do more of what I was good at in less of what I was. In fact, all fund managers ultimately know”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “I really appreciate that. You know, when you're a fund manager, there's a lot of other people trying to tell you how to do your job, or else it feels like that. Really what I wanted was cold hard facts, data that showed me, here is what you're good at, do more of this. Here's what you are bad at, do less of this, and really gives me the ability to maximize my return on energy expenditure. But nobody could really do that. And I found that very frustrating. And without clear vision into what is my competitive advantage really? Is it what's in my marketing material? Because we don't actually have proof of that other than my performance track record. Suddenly, I started to add to myself much deeper questions about where my skills actually lay. And I didn't have answers and I didn't have a route to getting those answers really. And so I packed it in and decided that I would do something.”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “was a long only tech fund manager during the internet bubble in the late 90s and it was great you know everything i touched turned to gold and i won all the awards and i was god's gift to fund management and i actually left and started a long short tech funds launched in march of 01 by then not everything was great and everything i didn't turn to gold and although it could short by that point my approach in terms of fundamental analysis just wasn't working that was fine but my interest was in finding ways to improve you know what if this isn't working okay but could somebody please tell me what i should be doing differently and nobody could tell me that all i could say was well one thing that would be different would be if you made more money”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Position sizing and portfolio construction. Our conversations cover the founding of their respective businesses, the mistakes portfolio managers commonly make, the tools they employ to help managers improve, and the challenges they face in broader adoption of these modern tools. Clients of Essentia and Alpha Theory have consistently demonstrated improvement in their results after employing these techniques. If you ask Claire and Cameron, you may come away with a whole new appreciation of the potential for active management and equities going forward. You can learn more about these two innovative companies at Essentia-analytics.com. That's ESSENTIA-Lytics.com, and alpha theory.com. We'll start the conversation with Claire and continue later with Cameron. Please enjoy my conversation with Claire Flynn Levy and Cameron. Thanks for joining me”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Our exploration of the use of modern data analytics to enhance investment results continues this week with two of the leading providers of tools for portfolio managers. My guests on today's show are Claire Flynn Levy and Cameron Hait, both former investment managers who became entrepreneurs seeking to improve outcomes for other managers. Claire is the founder and CEO of Essentia Analytics, a service that gathers and assesses rich data to help managers overcome common behavioral biases and optimize their trading activity. Cameron is the founder and CEO of Alpha Theory, a fintech company that helps investment managers optimize their position sizing process by creating a disciplined real-time process based on a decision algorithm with roots in actuarial science, physics, and poker, alpha theory takes the guessing out of”

    2018-03-12 · Capital Allocators · Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source