A portfolio manager I used to work with once remarked that if you stay in finance for long enough, you begin to see everything as a stock. When I first heard this, as an intern at an investment firm in 2017, it seemed like one of those Wall Street neologisms that sound true, but don’t feel true until you’ve lived them firsthand (other neologisms that fall under this category: “Don’t short on valuation”, “Don’t short on competition”, and my personal favorite: “Don’t try to predict the future. Try to describe the present”). This particular piece of wisdom was palpable almost immediately: in August of 2017, I drove to the Hamptons with some friends and realized that the PM who said that everything looked like a stock had a long or short position in half of the retailers occupying the strip malls along the Southhampton Bypass. In finance, even a trip to the beach is a quest for alpha.
