The Ledger
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Visser: Following market narratives is a complete waste of time
“I don't follow narratives in markets. I think narratives are a waste of time. I follow the wisdom of markets, which means when certain assets are starting to go a direction that doesn't make sense with the narrative, I'll talk to the PM.”
Visser: Asset managers not adopting video and data visualization are missing out
“If you haven't changed your marketing approach at this point to incorporate the power of technology, the power of zoom and the visualization, as opposed to a conference call, you're missing out.”
Visser: Allocators respect marketers more when they cut unproductive meetings short
“You'd be surprised at how much the person on the other end actually respects you more for saying, Hey, I have a lot of time in my day to time has become one of the things for all human beings that has become an issue.”
Visser: Only 100 to 200 global institutions can allocate to multi-strats
“Meaning for the institutional side, there's only about a hundred, maybe two 200 potential global investors that can invest enough money in a multi-strategy fund for us to really build relationships with.”
Visser: Adaptability Quotient is the dominant metric when interviewing hires
“When I interview people, whether they're a PM, or whether they're someone that's going to help the marketing effort, I'm literally in my head going through an IQ, EQ, AQ measurement, and I'm asking all my questions mainly towards AQ and EQ, but AQ for the most…”
George Weiss's family office generated over 50% annual returns prior to 2005
“George had gone through a long time period where not only had they been highly successful, I think the family office returns were above 50% a year.”
Weiss investment teams maintain low pairwise correlations of 0.10 to 0.15
“And our pairwise correlation amongst the teams is somewhere around .one to .one five, which means when you look at it, we really don't have teams that are correlated to each other. We don't have overlapping approaches.”
Risk data must be visual because tabular data fails to communicate
“One of the beliefs I have in risk management is that you really need to have A lot of data. It needs to be visual. If it's tabular, it doesn't speak to you. And data visualization is the most important thing to me, heat maps, anything along those lines.”
Weiss uses a 'fossils' tool to flag positions unchanged for 10 days
“So we have a visualization called fossils, where we want to see any position that they have in their portfolio that hasn't been meaningfully changed within 10 days.”
Weiss Multi-Strategy replaces marketing pitch decks with live WebEx analytics
“We don't use marketing decks anymore. We use WebEx's to present, and we show them the baseball cards.”
Weiss targets portfolio managers with 60% 10-day win rates and 1.0 Sharpe
“So we're looking for them to basically be able to make money on a rolling ten-day basis over 60% of the time, on a rolling five-day basis over about 55% of the time. We want them to be able to make money most years running market neutral with high turnover wit…”
Weiss ranks internal portfolio teams using 15 quantitative and qualitative metrics
“We have a league table which ranks all of the teams here based on 15 different analytical metrics that are pure quantitative, and then there's about three or four qualitative metrics”
George Weiss operated his market-neutral fund as a bank liquidity provider
“He chose something where he basically was running kind of like a market making business, and the banks were using him for liquidity purposes. So he was a liquidity provider, high turnover, market neutral, made it unique.”
Visser: Weiss AUM reached $4B with most growth during COVID
“We're now at four billion, and most of that growth actually happened during COVID, which has a lot to do, I think, with building the analytics out for the marketing side, but also, I think we spoke about this the last time, we were already using technology to …”