One huge advantage of being an Investment Analyst is yogic sage level detachment. You pass judgement on the value of a business, but active investors are still not activist investors. They stand apart. Management, customers, suppliers, competitors etc. need not even be aware of the investor’s existence. I remember one young (at the time) analyst moaning about what he was supposed to do with the next five years. The time it would take to get a sense if 50-60% of his decisions were “correct”. Like a dentist can fix a tooth in a couple of minutes, or take hours just for the sake of it, the main “job” of active investors isn’t the investment, it is the business of raising capital to invest. One huge disadvantage of being an Investment Analyst, is thinking you can make the same detached decisions in the real world. The real world has momentum and morale. Decisions do impact other people. Changing track has a real cost. There is no such thing as an independent decision. We must engage in the messy interplay of coordinating with other real people who see differently, want differently, and do differently.
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