If you recall, we blogged about how we named ourselves.
Your firm’s name is a representation of who you are, reflecting your unconscious biases, influenced by your experience, beliefs, and vision. It establishes the beginning of a firm’s reputation.
We analyze how asset managers name themselves and what, if any, are the implications to their long term success.
Name and Legacy
Surprisingly, more firms sport a combination of a first or last name. What does naming after someone’s first and last names tell you about the firm and their founder’s vision?
- Founders who choose a family name would have a desire to extend family legacy
- Founders who want to build and leave behind personal legacy
- Founders were focused on the business, and didn’t want to spend too much time on picking the name, which is always a time consuming process.
Although this naming convention has become less popular over time.
Nature is next
What does the name say about your potential to manage assets? Nature is the strongest predictor of success, where success is defined for analytical purposes as the combination of assets under management and the size of the firms.
We dig deeper into nature, and we find:
Private funds as differentiator?
How do firms running advisory businesses name themselves? And how does it compare to firms that manage private funds?
Who and how did we perform this analysis?
Jingjing Xu (UConn’s Financial Risk Management program) joined us for the summer. She leveraged information science techniques to analyze broad based patterns and correlations from public datasets. Below are summary steps she performed:
- Collect and stratify data
- Pre-process data to remove noise
- Remove false positives and true negatives to reduce complexity
- Add topic classifier
- Interpret and iterate on output
How important is a firm name’s for your investing decision? Wonder what your portfolio looks like, from a volume or investment weighted perspective? Email us if you want to run it through our algorithm at ask@diligencevault.com
What’s next?
Another interesting analysis is predicting name category based on unsupervised learning from profiling clusters of data points. If interested in doing this analysis, we are at learn@diligencevault.com
