peterbirks | Funding

I don't normally read the Finnacial Times Fund management Monday supplement. generally speaking, fund managers are sheep, petrified of being too far away from the mean, rather than worrying about absolute performance over the long term.

Anyway, Richard Plackett of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, one of those people who charges you 1.5% a year to make investments that you could make yourself, said that skill at the game of Bridge was a better requirement for good fund managers than was skill at Poker.

"Bridge is a complicated form of poker. Bridge is about probability and psychology. It is more sophisticated because it is a partnership game".

Now, you can take this as the bollox that it is, but, surprsingly, I agree with Plackett that, to be a good fund manager, being good at Bridge is probably more of an advantage than being good at Poker.

Where Poker comes into its own is not in fund management, but in trading.

Now, ask your streetwise trader what he thinks of fund managers, and I doubt that the phrasing will be entirely complimentary. But trading (particularly foreign exchange) struck me as being just like a game of poker, with a few exceptions:

1) You didn't know how many players there were
2) You didn't know the stack sizes
3) You didn't know the rules

Apart from that, just like poker. Indeed, the fun part was working out the number of players, the stack sizes (was the Bank of Japan in the game today?) and the rules. Once you thought you had that sussed, making money was a piece of piss.