A Few Simple Rules For Money Managers to Improve Performance

One of the biggest hazards of being a professional money manager is that you are expected to behave in a certain way: You have to come to the office every day, work long hours, slog through countless e-mails, be on top of your portfolio (that is, check performance of your securities minute by minute), watch business TV and consume news continuously, and dress well and conservatively, wearing a rope around the only part of your body that lets air get to your brain. Our colleagues judge us on how early we arrive at work and how late we stay. We do these things because society expects us to, not because they make us better investors or do any good for our clients.

Somehow we let the mindless, Henry Ford–assembly-line, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., widgets-per-hour mentality dictate how we conduct our business thinking. Though car production benefits from rigid rules, uniforms, automation and strict working hours, in investing — the business of thinking — the assembly-line culture is counterproductive. Our clients and employers would be better off if we designed our workdays to let us perform our best.

投资不是一个每小时思想;它可能会导致每年的一些想法。传统的结构化的工作环境会产生输出的压力 - 一个想法，即使是强迫的想法。Warren Buffett曾经在伯克希尔·海瑟韦一年周会议上说：“我们没有获得活动;我们得到了正确的报酬。关于我们等待多久，我们将无限期地等待。“

你如何获得想法取决于你。我不是专业的作家，而是作为专业的货币经理，我通过写作学习并思考最好。我戴上耳机，打开歌剧，盯着我的电脑屏幕，啄在键盘的键盘 - 这就是我的想法。你可以在公园里散步或坐在桌子上坐在桌子上，盯着天花板。

I do my best thinking in the morning. At 3:00 in the afternoon, my brain shuts off; that is when I read my e-mails. We are all different. My best friend is a brunch person; he needs to consume six cups of coffee in the morning just to get his brain going. To be most productive, he shouldn’t go to work before 11:00 a.m.

And then there’s the business news. Serious business news that lacked sensationalism, and thus ratings, has been replaced by a new genre: business entertainment (of course, investors did not get the memo). These shows do a terrific job of filling our need to have explanations for everything, even random events that require no explanation (like daily stock movements). Most information on the business entertainment channels — Bloomberg Television, CNBC, Fox Business — has as much value for investors as daily weather forecasts have for travelers who don’t intend to go anywhere for a year. Yet many managers have CNBC, Fox or Bloomberg on while they work.

你可能认为你能过滤噪音。你不能;它压倒了你。所以不要打击噪音 - 阻止它。在市场开放时留下电视，并且在一天结束时，检查业务频道网站，看看是否有值得关注的访谈或新闻事件。

Don’t check your stock quotes continuously; doing so shrinks your time horizon. As a long-term investor, you analyze a company and value the business over the next decade, but daily stock volatility will negate all that and turn you into a trader. There is nothing wrong with trading, but investors are rarely good traders.

Numerous studies have found that humans are terrible at multitasking. We have a hard time ignoring irrelevant information and are too sensitive to new information. Focus is the antithesis of multitasking. I find that I’m most productive on an airplane. I put on my headphones and focus on reading or writing. There are no distractions — no e-mails, no Twitter, no Facebook, no instant messages, no phone calls. I get more done in the course of a four-hour flight than in two days at the office. But you don’t need to rack up frequent-flier miles to focus; just go into “off mode” a few hours a day: Kill your Internet, turn off your phone, and do what you need to do.

我敢打赌，如果我们大多数人真的专注，我们可以从五天到两个人削减我们的工作周。表现会改善，我们的个人生活会变得更好，最终的心脏病发作将被推还十年或两个。

Take the rope off your neck and wear comfortable clothes to work (I often opt for jeans and a “Life is good” T-shirt). Pause and ask yourself a question: If I was not bound by the obsolete routines of the dinosaur age of assembly-line manufacturing, how would I structure my work to be the best investor I could be? Print this article, take it to your boss and tell him or her, “This is what I need to do to be the most productive.” • •

Vitaliy Katsenelson (vk@imausa.com) is CIO at Investment Management Associates in Denver and author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets.