As an example of the quality of emails we get consider the following example.

Anyway, my real reason for writing to you is what I saw on your video in the background, what appears to be a playground in front of the swimming pool. Specifically, that plant you have with all the green leaves sticking up. I don’t know what its name is (though my wife probably would), but, I want to warn you that it can give you a nasty & painful jab. Some years ago, we had four of those plants next to our pool, along our back fence. Then one day I was doing something close to them, and one of the leaves somehow pricked me in my ear. I can tell you that was one of the most painful experiences I have had in my life. I would suggest that you take care with any children coming anywhere near them (I’m an adult, not a child).

If you feel the leaves, you will see that they are pretty firm, and that the ends are pretty sharp (ours were a lot taller, but I am sure yours would feel the same). If they get into someone’s ear, or, worse still, their eye, they could give that person a very painful experience. What I did after it happened (and after I explained it to my disbelieving wife) was to cut all the sharp ends off each leaf.

In case you are wandering, NO, I am not some crackpot, (really thats not what the evidence suggests) just a person who has had a very painful experience with one leaf off one of our four plants, and I feel it is my duty to warn anybody with the same plants, hence my email to you.

There is no need to respond to this email, I know that you must be a very busy lady, just take care with that plant, that is all I can say. Oh, and keep up the good work with your great books.

For those not a horticultural bent or not sufficiently obsessed by what is in the blurred out background of a video the plant in question is a Yukka.  It is not a Triffid nor is it Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors – its a friggen mildly spiky plant. I have one by my front door and at no stage has it ever looked like it might lurch forward and decapitate me.

I can only surmise that our somewhat over cautious author is a sort of health and safety type who works in the public service. You know the sort who before you can use a step ladder insists that you do a course and get a certificate in step laddering.

Within the world of managed funds be they hedge funds, private funds, alternative investments or mutual funds there is an observation that performance drops off with size. The traditional arc of the life of a managed investment is that a new manager pops ups, generates impressive performance, attracts a truck load of money and then struggles to replicate their earlier performance.

This paper looks at the implications of this phenomena and why it might be so.

For me the most telling of the paper is this table -

The performance drop off with increasing size is well shown but what is also interesting is that drawdown drifts up and then plateaus. So those in the fund are earning less but also exposed to larger swings in equity.

The conclusion has a very insightful sting in it -

But it is a necessity in order to identify and tap into up and coming talent. In the words of one of our long time colleagues, Tom O’Donnell (a Partner with The Bornhoft Group – a firm that has been specializing in multi-manager CTA portfolios for 25 years), he agrees that asset growth is an important part of the manager due diligence process.  He says, “The tricky part is determining if the asset growth makes the manager better at managing money?  Or better at counting the money he manages?” The goal in our eyes is to get a hold of a manager when they are good at managing the money, and not yet thinking about counting the money.

You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity.

I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on.

I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.

New York Times

The conclusion – stop whinging it ain’t that bad.

This week on Here’s the Thing, Alec talks about the financial crisis with Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Stiglitz shows no restraint when unleashing criticism of presidential policies — on both sides. Of President Barack Obama’s financial-industry rescue plan, Stiglitz said that whomever designed it was “either in the pocket of the banks or … incompetent.” Stiglitz talks to Alec about growing up in Gary, Indiana and how that impacted his decision to become an economist.