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This week, I attended my first industry conference in two years. I met some interesting people, my presentations went well, participated in other interesting panel discussions, and learned some really new things. All in all, it was a successful trip.
The most interesting things to discuss are not during group discussions or presentations. As it turns out, several speakers – who have been in the industry for a long time and hold very senior positions at major institutions – have cancelled their appearances.
Why? they are not vaccinated.
Proof of vaccination is required by airlines, venues and the conference event itself. There may be a lot of vaccine hesitancy in other industries, but what about investing? I don’t think finance is one of them.1 I was wrong, it was a surprise.
There are many parallels between the work people in our industry do and the decision-making process that ultimately leads to the decision to vaccinate. Consider this definition, a variant of which is my preferred definition:
“Investing is the art of using incomplete information to make probabilistic assessments of an inherently unknowable future. “
Making good investment decisions is no different than making good healthcare decisions.
When the pandemic first started, little was known about Covid-19. When mRNA vaccines came out, we had little experience with them; data on infection rates, mortality, side effects, etc. have been equivocal and potentially confusing.
It appears that the skills required to successfully meet these challenges are similar.
Especially considering ourJudgment under uncertainty“From the field behavioral economics: You know??????your decision is made by Cognitive error? you are working on partisan politics? Are you tribal? without thinking?
In these pages, we discuss problematic ways of interpreting behavioral economics and the cognitive problems these problems embody, from confirmation bias to conflating politics with investing.
Worrying about the safety of a new emergency vaccine approval in December 2020 is one thing; it’s something else entirely 11 billion shots Administered after 16 months. Failure to objectively evaluate new data due to cognitive dissonance is a classic behavioral error.
An executive at a large asset management company was discussing this with me. Part of the company’s new product team includes one of the group’s salespeople — the company’s customer-facing head. It’s really his job to discuss, explain and sell the company’s products face-to-face with the company’s largest institutional investors. He was not vaccinated throughout the lockdown (then Delta, then Omicron) and no one knew he wasn’t vaccinated. Now that 75% of American adults are vaccinated and everyone else suffers from Zoom fatigue, it’s time to get out and about the world. The employee cannot enter the office, should not be meeting with clients, and will soon face an important decision: Get vaccinated or find another job.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that in such a late day, there is still persistence. In an industry that requires rational and probabilistic thinking, there are still people making decisions that seem increasingly difficult to defend.
Presented differently: If you are in charge of managing people’s wealth, maintaining long-term investments for their retirement, intergenerational wealth transfer and philanthropy, what should your clients expect from you?
If not rationality and clear, calm thinking, what is it?
Before:
Investing is a problem-solving exercise (January 31, 2022)
DELTA is here for your economic recovery (August 13, 2021)
How bad is business travel? (August 11, 2021)
The Economic Risks of Anti-Vaxxers (July 15, 2021)
inadvertently (February 3, 2021)
___________
1. In New York City, frontline emergency workers such as police officers, EMTs and firefighters are threatened with being fired if they don’t get vaccinated. After a ruckus, all but a few were fully vaccinated.
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