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Psychology
Why the Best Investors, Like Tibetan Monks, are Psychopaths
I may be a psychopath. This scary thought is not the result of discovering a bunch of unidentified body parts in the freezer, nor is it a consequence of my having flunked a Cosmo personality test in the supermarket checkout line.
Perhaps the possibility of my being a psychopath does not surprise you at all, given the conventional wisdom that business in general, and financial industry in particular, attracts such miscreants.
You know the type — the Gordon Gekkos of the world, as depicted in movies like Wall Street.
However, as you may know, the company I built and ran for 25 years, Daruma Capital Management, was founded on quite the opposite premise. We believed that the traditional dog-eat-dog, eat-what-you-kill model creates selfish behavior that may not be in the long-term interests of either the portfolio or the clients.
When we began, we were determined to prove that an investment process based on collaboration would lead to more intellectual honesty, make the most of each team member’s strengths, and would generate better performance over the long term, precisely because unselfish behavior was expected and rewarded.
