Hedge Fund Manager Paul Tudor Jones Reduces Risk With Content Strategy
Hedge fund content strategy has been slowly but surely making progress. After years of disappointing returns and increasing fee pressure, hedge fund marketers may want to study every management lesson available as the asset class becomes more institutional. Industry veteran Paul Tudor Jones, founder of $14B asset management firm Tudor Investment, recommends taking a page out of the journalism playbook to focus communications.
In an interview with Bloomberg GO, Jones made the case for more efficient content strategy to reduce risk:
"Today, in business, time is money. When you’ve got hundreds of decisions to make every week — dozens every day — being able to see, think and understand what the issue is in the first couple of paragraphs is actually paramount to being efficient at what you do."
Jones recommends that his staff improve their communications and reports by taking a “journalism 101″ class focused on newspaper writing, as opposed to magazine writing. Companies save time and money when their executives write in a clear, logical way. Newspaper writing teaches journalists to use a hierarchical approach to a topic:
"From the most important to the least important so that at any point in time you can chop off the paragraphs from the bottom all the way up and still have something that follows all the way through."
Jones literally tears up and throws away magazine-style memos and makes the writer take an online newspaper writing class. Magazine writing tends to use an overly narrative approach that’s more of a journey — with the climax at the end. Newspaper-style content strategy is also useful in general business problem solving:
"If you can take the whole issue, distill it down into its most important parts — who, what, where, when, why and how in the first paragraph, and then the second most important part after that — you’ll be able to see the big picture and come up with the answer and be the most valuable employee wherever you work."
Like much of the hedge fund industry, Jones is wise to reduce operational risk with more efficient communications at what may be a critical inflection point. According to New York Times reporting on Tudor investor communications from late 2013, Tudor has long-term annual returns of nearly 20% in their $10.3B flagship fund, Tudor BVI Global. But it’s been more than a decade since they last “shot out the lights” at that level. Smart content strategy can go a long way at times like this to keep investors engaged and reduce competitive risk as well.
