from Hacker News

Unattractive funds managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2%

by donsupreme on 12/14/23, 8:51 PM with 97 comments

  • by jack_riminton on 12/14/23, 9:39 PM

    This is Nassim Taleb's “Surgeon Paradox”: “If you're choosing between two surgeons of equal merit, choose the one who DOESN'T look the part, because they had to overcome more to get to where they are.”

  • by karaterobot on 12/14/23, 10:00 PM

    > Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.

    This makes sense as a consequence of people's tendency to prefer attractive people, and seems related but not identical to the Peter principle. They'd tend to get responsibility unwarranted by their past performance because they're just so damned good looking!

    Hmm, if this study has legs, maybe my next resume should highlight how ugly I am. And if I put a bag over my head during the interview, maybe they'll think I'm so hideous that I must truly be a genius.

    * 16 years industry experience

    * History of delivering blah blah

    * Face looks like a mule kicked it

  • by hgomersall on 12/14/23, 10:04 PM

    I have a general philosophy that when outsourcing you should go with the company that has the crappiest web presence and least good branding because obviously, if they're still in business dispute their terrible marketing, they must be good.

  • by ladberg on 12/14/23, 10:04 PM

    Doesn't seem to be mentioned in any other comments or the paper itself, but this is Berkson's paradox.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox

  • by april7 on 12/14/23, 9:35 PM

    "Utilizing the state-of-art deep learning technique to quantify facial attractiveness" we're really there

  • by deadbeeves on 12/14/23, 10:19 PM

    Couldn't this just be statistical noise? 2% isn't a huge difference, and if you partition stock funds into two arbitrary groups it's almost certain that one will on average perform better than the other, but not by a lot. The next question to ask should be how much better are stock managers who have an odd number of hairs on their head, compared to those who have an even number.

  • by Animats on 12/14/23, 9:53 PM

    This is China's mutual fund market, where reliable numbers about business financials are hard to come by.

  • by beepboopboop on 12/14/23, 10:42 PM

    There’s edge cases though, I run a fund and we’re one of the top perf… oh… oh no.

  • by neilv on 12/14/23, 10:03 PM

    Is there somewhere I can opt-in to be worse at investing, in exchange for doing much better on dating apps?

  • by huijzer on 12/14/23, 9:39 PM

    Because it’s almost Christmas, a related joke from Warren Buffett:

    "I heard they called off the Wall Street Christmas pageant because they couldn’t find three wise men"

    The point being that most fund managers do not outperform the index, so 2% more or less isn’t that important.

  • by junar on 12/14/23, 9:40 PM

  • by PessimalDecimal on 12/14/23, 9:31 PM

    A good maxim is to employ people who are hired and promoted for their ability and not for extraneous reasons.

  • by lolpanda on 12/14/23, 11:09 PM

    link to non paywalled version of this https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-fi...

    this paper also defines good looking and how to measure it with machine learning algorithms. given that look is highly subjective, any findings based on that is not very useful

  • by Animats on 12/14/23, 9:34 PM

    2% is huge.

    Is there a non-paywalled copy of this?

  • by angarg12 on 12/14/23, 9:38 PM