Today, I have finally decided to tell you that when it comes to your career as an analyst or portfolio manager, you are the problem. You want more assets to manage? You want to sell more subscriptions to your newsletter? Or even, you want to get a better job on the Street?
Short of skywriting your resume over Remsenburg and Asbury Park, or worse, taking out a Facebook ad to annoy your friends, what are you going to do to further yourself? Your momma already told you - network. She did not mean to send invitations to famous people in your chosen field on LinkedIn, either.
Getting you name out there is hard and getting harder now that so many industry publications have either shrunken budgets or shuttered windows (alas, poor SFO, I knew you well). You can intern on a trading desk for no money. You can go to the Money Show and hope to get a word with your favorite speaker after he/she gives a presentation - you and every other trading nerd in attendance and I say that with extreme love for trading nerds.
You want to be on CNBC as a talking head? You want to see your name in the Wall Street Journal as a source? You would love to be the next Alan Abelson, wouldn't you?
Here is a news flash for you - journalists and producers need you. Do you think it is easy to put out "news" 12 times per day where there is no news at all? I myself put out five newsletter, two columns, a conference call, free charts and assorting articles every week. Even a prime morning time financial TV show was talking about little Prince what's-his-name over in London. Filler, filler, salaciousness and more filler.
How do you reach them? Sure, you have sent your latest research opinion to Joe Reporter. You added him to your free media distribution list. You even used his Twitter handle in one of your dozens of daily Tweets. Guess what? None of that gets read. You are wasting your time and probably pissing off the journalist by filling up his inbox with your spam. Yes, spam. That's what it is when it floods his inbox.
Let me give you a tip from someone who needs sources to someone who wants to be a source. First of all, step back and let that line sink in. We need each other. But we are like two star crossed lovers on a daytime soap opera that just cannot get it together.The tension builds but there is no climax.
From my point of view, there are plenty of others out there just like you. If Sidney does not feed me ideas, Sydney will (come on, you saw they are spelled differently). How are you going to cut trough the clutter.
Let me say that I personally am not that important in your career but collectively we journalists from analysts to real news gathering reporters are. So what's the tip? Is it really that complicated?
Give us what we need.
No, we do not need your support and resistance levels on the S&P 500. We do not need your Elliott Wave count or your earnings projections or your business forecast. We need something unique and something important. We need events that happen beneath the surface that are potential game changers in the market.
Again, no, not Elon Musk is a visionary CEO. Not falling homebuilder stocks will be bad for the Dow. But something like, "we've seen this setup before and the market moved 15% in two weeks." Or the last time there was this much short interest......or volume was this way.....or the mother of them all, Peter Eliades' "sign of the bear" indicator where he noted that when market breadth goes dead flat for three weeks the market is about to collapse.
I am paraphrasing, of course, but bring me the next Hindenburg Omen. The next dead cat bounce. Or the next double reverse whirligig (it is not every day I get to quote a fictitious indicator from my second book).
Tell me that the last two serious market crashes - 1929 and 1987 - occurred a Fibonacci 55 days from an all-time high. It happened in July of this year without the crash but tell me anyway. It makes for a good story.
As I said, don't send your newsletter. Nobody has time to read it. Nobody has time to wade through the pig poop in there to find the truffle. Instead, make contact with something useful and ask if it is OK to send a "special report" when there really is something big to tell my/our readers. And make sure it is special and not just a weekly brain dump. Think "spoon feed."
You will get quoted. And fame and fortune will soon flow your way. Well, at least the fame part. You can start your scrapbook of all your media citings to show your potential customers. At least your momma will be proud.
No comments:
Post a Comment