I thought it might be fun to describe my working while blogging day. I'm interested to hear about yours too!
I work in the fairly boring world of private placement. A private placement is basically no different from a normal purchase of securities except they are not offered on the public markets. There are more exciting ways they work (such as hedge fund private placements) but mine are pretty boring. I have access to a number of what are called 'family offices' which are mostly conservatively managed inheritances and family trusts. Sometimes they take a little bit of risk with a PP. These are my clients. The vast majority are not billionaires. Just sort of regular folks with some money left them by some ancestor, sometimes months ago, sometimes generations ago. Broker/Dealers send me a number of such placements every day. Sometimes I go searching. In the jargon I'm what's called a 'purchaser representative.' Its mostly scuttlebutt. The part that's fun is listening to young entrepreneurs on the move. Their energy is infectious, but you have to step back from that. I work with some financial modeling computer geeks who are brilliant.
Mostly its just tons and tons and tons of reading memorandums, analysis, taking notes from oral conversation and regulatory compliance. Lots and lots of regulatory compliance. Sometimes I have to go and see things for myself which means travel. Due diligence. Then I make a recommendation. Its tedious but not difficult work which is why I escape from time to time into politics here or sports at sbnation. Yes, markos owns my eyeballs. I multitask pretty much constantly.
I watch the markets. Its boring.
I have a 'philosophy' such as it is. I look for defensible core technology. Which is basically having something nobody else has and cannot quickly duplicate. Naturally there is a lot of secrecy involved. All around. From there its on to more subjective guessing but I generally err on the side of long term growth. Sometimes its just purely a question of value. I look for things that are cheaper than they ought to be but have a rather sturdy floor. I generally stay away from anything that doesn't have an inventor at its origin. After all, it isn't my money.
That's basically it. No, its not high flying trading and coke fueled exploits. Sorry to disappoint.
How about you?