Satellieten bouwen en portefeuilles ontwerpen


Jed Fogdall beschrijft zijn overstap van satelliet engineering naar portefeuillebeheer en hoe het in beide functies belangrijk is om door de ruis heen te kijken naar wat echt belangrijk is. 


If you're thinking about noise in terms of a distracting sound or some background thing that is irritating, then it's a background energy that doesn't have anything to do with the information you're trying to focus on. I was trained as an engineer in my undergrad, went to work building satellites. Everything has to be really tightly synced in that whole system. And you're thinking about sending energy up from the earth 22,000 miles up to a satellite and then 22,000 miles back somewhere else. You have stuff in the atmosphere that creates noise. Things just don't work if you have too much noise. I was still working as an engineer when I decided to go and study finance more formally. And what I realized is that there's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't really help you make investing decisions. And to me, that was all noise. And it was in my first finance class at UCLA, and one day they came and handed out the Dimensional Fund Advisors Harvard Business School case. So my group and I studied Dimensional Fund Advisors, and I knew that it was really tough to beat the market. I knew that there was this body of work where we actually knew something about financial markets and it was scientifically testable and scientifically demonstrated. And here was a shop that actually took all that and put it to work in real life day-to-day in real portfolios. And I thought, bingo, that's a place I could work. Like in engineering, when you have a set of basic research and you can use those facts to go and design a bridge or design a skyscraper, you have some idea of how things are gonna behave. But then the exciting part is when you actually build something and the noise and the randomness happens and you need to make decisions that deal with that. And I think finance and more specifically, managing portfolios in the way Dimensional does is very, very similar to that. We have a set of things that we know based on the work of Fama and French and all the other academics that we work with and we use that to design portfolios. But then when we go and interact with the market every single day, there are things that happen that you can't anticipate. What sets Dimensional's philosophy apart gets back to this whole distinction between information and noise. There's so much noise and so many places that it can come from whether it's someone watching the news or someone reading an article or even someone looking at at data themselves. What parts can you ignore? What parts should you pay attention to? And that's why it's satisfying.

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