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Nineteen ninety five. Me and another asset management grad are in Balls Brothers wine bar after work. We’re discussing the industry with an old sales hand that we’ll call Peter, because that was his name.
Anyway, Peter had zero respect for those of us who actually ran the funds. If you think this game has anything to do with performance, he said to us, you’re both idiots.
He was right, I soon learned. You only need to see how many investment professionals drive a Porsche despite a career of average returns. What matters is gathering lots of assets. And then keeping them.
In those days we did the latter by flying our US clients and their partners to London and putting them up in the palatial company flat overlooking the Thames. George Bernard Shaw used to live there and it didn’t suck.
But that was a last…
