If You Can’t Promote Your Investment Fund with Ease, It’s Wrong
A simple rule: If you cannot explain what your investment fund does — if you cannot translate technical details into intelligible facts — your results, no matter how impressive and separate from the stagnant or mediocre performance of the market as a whole, are irrelevant.
For investors make decisions based on what they can measure — and what they can understand.
If they find the latter indecipherable, and if they mistakenly believe what is (mostly) impenetrable to a lay audience is also incomprehensible to a group of financial experts, they will pass.
Put another way, and to modify a quote from the late Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate and bon vivant of the world of science and physics:
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you can’t promote your investment fund with ease, it’s wrong.
Without an investor relations (IR) or media relations specialist to honor Feynman’s dictum, let me, as said IR consultant, emphasize the following: You will fail.
My comment is not an indictment of a fund manager’s intelligence or confidence; it is, instead, a statement of fact — that you, the reader of this post and the professional responsible for making critical investment decisions, cannot afford to ignore the power of marketing and communications.
Silence is not an option, stubbornness is not an alternative and sanctimony is not a choice.
Promote your investment fund — or perish.
